Dialogues

GILLES DELEUZE AND CLAIRE PARNET

Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habbnjam
Gilles Deleuu examines his own work in a series of discu.ioas with
Claire Parnet, exploring his philosophical background and dnelopment,
the central themes of his work, and some of his relationships, in panicular
his long association with the philosopher Felix Guanari. Comenational
in tone, this is the most personal and accessible of all Deleuu's writings,
and will have great appeal to anyone who has studied Deleuu or is
interested in his work.
First published in France in 1977, .Dialopes is at last available in English,
with a new preface Deleuze has written especially for this edition.
Gilles Deleuzc, one of France's foremost philosophers, is Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Paris.
Claire Parnet is a philosopher and French reporter who conducted the
series of interviews which resulted in this book.
Also of interest
Nietzsche and Philosophy
GILLES DELEUZE
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
First published in 1962, Nietzsche et 14 PbiJosophie demonstrates,
with a rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative
interpretation, how Friedrich Nietzsche initiated a new mode of
philosophical thinking. This landmark book is one of the first to
dispute the deep-seated assumption that dialectics provides the
onfy possible basis for radical thought.
"To read Nietzsche and Philosophy is to experience the earnestness
of challenge to Western philosophy. ... An extremely
rich and systematic reading."
-The Times Higher Education Supplement
Columbia Univenity Press/New York
ISBN 0-231-06601-5

243(
D2E
Gtlles Delezot and Claire lkrntt
Translated by Hut} Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam
Dialogues
GILLES DELEUZE
and
CLAIRE PARNET
Trari.Slated by
HUGH TOMLINSON
and
BARBARA HABBERJAM
tOe
New York Columbia University Press
Columblia University
New York
1977 Flammarion, Paris.
Translation of preface and translators' introd .
1987 The Athlone Press ucuon
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deleuze, Gilles.
Di alogues.
(European perspectives)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. D_eleuze, Gilles-Interviews. I p
11 arnet, Claire.
TuJe. II I. Series.
AC25.D4213 1987 o
84
,_
1
ISBN 0-231-06600-7 Hardback
ISBN 0-231-o6601-5 Paperback
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
P 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13
87-5199
Contents
Preface to English Language Edition by GiLles Deleuz.e
Translators ' Introduction
I. A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?
2. On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature
3. Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse
4. Many Politics
Notes
Index
Vll
XI
36
77
124
149
155
Preface to the English Language Edition
I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.
But what does this equivalence between empiricism and
pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by
which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not
explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to
rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the condi-
tions under which something new is produced (creativenus).
1
In so-called rationalist philosophies, the abstract is given the
task of explaining, and it is the abstract that is reaUzed in the
concrete. One starts with abstractions such as the One, the
Whole, the Subject, and one looks for the process by which
they are embodied in a world which they make conform to
their requirements (this process can be knowledge, virtue,
history . .. ). Even if it means undergoing a terrible crisis each
time that one sees rational unity or totality turning into their
opposites, or the subject generating monstrosities.
Empiricism starts with a completely different evaluation:
anal ysing the states of things, in such a way that non-pre-
existent concepts can be extracted from them. States of things
are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities. It is not just
that there are several states of things (each one of which would
be yet a nother); nor that each state of things is itself multiple
(which would simpl y be to indica te its resistance to uni-
fi cation). The essential thing, from the point of view of
empiricism, is the noun multiplicity, which designates a set of
lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another.
Every ' thing' is made up in this way. Of course a multiplicity
\
VIII Dialogues
incl.ude.s of unification, centres of totali zation, points of
but as factors which can prevent its growth
s top Its hnes. These factors are in the multi plicity to
wh1ch they belong, and not the reverse. In a multiplicity what
counts are not the terms or the elements but what there is
'b ' h '
etween , t e between, a set of relations which are not separ-
each other. Every multiplicity grows from the
m1ddle, hke t?e blade of grass or the rhizome. We constantl y
oppose the .rh1zome to the tree, like two conceptions and even
two different ways of t hinking. A line does not go from
one potnt t? ano.ther, but passes between the points,
b1furcatmg and diverging, like one of Pollock's
IJnes.
. To extract th: concepts. correspond to a multiplicity
IS to trace the hnes of wh1ch 1t is made up, to determine t he
nature of .these lines,. to see how they become entangled,
connect, bifurcate, avo1d or fail to avoid the foci. These Jines
are true becomings, which are dis tinct not only from unities but
from the history in which they are developed.
made up of becomings without history, of individuation
Without subject (the way in which a river, a climate, an event,
a day, an hour of the day, is individualized) . That is the
exists just as much in empiricism as in rationalism,
but It a different use and a completely different
na.ture: It IS a instead of a being-one, a
bemg as _s ubJ eCt. Empiricism is fundamentall y
linked to a log1c- a log1c of multiplicities (of which relations
are only one aspect) .
. This (first publish:d in France in 1977) aims to high-
light the ex1stence and acuon of mul tiplicities in very different
One day Freud sensed that the psychopath ex-
pen ences and thinks multiplicities: the ski n is a collection of
pores, the slipper, a field of stitches, the bone is extracted from
an ossuary ... But he constantly fell back on the calmer vision
of a unconscious which plays with eternal
abstractions (and even Melanie Klein's partial objects still
Preface to the English Language Edition IX
refer to a uni ty, even if it is lost, to a totality, even if it is to
come to a subject, even if it is split). It is very difficult to
reach' a thought of the multiple as such, which is beco.me noun
lsubstantij] and which does need to to anythmg other
than Itself: the indefinite arucle as part1cle, the proper name
as individuation without subject, the verb in the infinitive as
pure becoming, 'a Hans horse .. : . ' I t .seemed to us
that the great proj ect of English and Amen can literature was
to get close to such multiplicities: it is in this literature.that the
question ' What is it to write?' has undoubtedl y rece1ved. the
answer which is closest to life itself, to vegetable and ammal
life. It also seemed to us that the highest objective of science,
mathematics and physics is multiplicity and that both set
theory and the theory of spaces are still in their .. It
seemed to us that politics is at stake as well and that m a soc1al
field rhizomes spread out everywhere under the arborescent
apparatuses. .
T his book is made up of such a collection of musings
[reveries] on the formations of the unconscious, on literary,
scientific and political formations.
This book itself was 'between' in several senses. It was
between two books, the Anti-Oedipus, which Guattari and I
had fini shed, and A Tlwusand Plateaus, which we had begun and
which was our most ambitious, most immoderate and worst-
received work. This book happened, therefore, not merely
between two books but between Felix Guattari and me. And
as [ wrote it with Clai re Parnet, this was a new point which
made possible a new line-between. What mattered was not the
points - Felix, Claire Parnet, me and many others, who
functioned simply as temporary, transitory and evanescent
points of subj ectivation - but the collection of bifurcating,
divergent and muddled lines which constituted book a_s a
multiplicity and which passed between the pomts, carrymg
them along wit hout ever going from the one to the othe.r.
Hence, the first plan for a conversation between two people, m
which one asked questions and the other replied, no longer
\
x Dialogues
any value. The divisions had to rest .
dimensions of the multiplicJty a d. on the growmg
' ccor mg to beco . h.
were unattributable to ind .d
1
. mmgs w 1ch
immersed in it without could not be
less sure what came from o h ua ltatJve y. As we became
even from someone els ne, w at came from the other, or
' What . . . ' e, we would become clearer about
IS It to wme? These are Jin h h
each other, like the to
opposed to the unity of the tree and its b. rl IZ?me,
really was a book withou . . mary og1c. Th1s
not without middle,t
e grass grows between
morality ... .' It JS an overflowing, a lesson in
Gilles Deleuze, 1986
Translators' Introduction
Dialogues was commissioned as a conventional book of inter-
views in a series of the same name which included interviews
with writers such as Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky.
However, as Deleuze says in the preface to this edition, it soon
became clear that the ' interview' format was inappropriate:
that the mechanism of ' question and answer' had the effect of
forcing him into a position in which he had nothing to say.
What was needed was a format in which a ' dialogue' could
take place without a forced, external ordering being placed on
Deleuze's thought. The result was a format in which each
chapter is a 'dialogue' consisting of two halves which link and
operate together in a multiplicity of ways. In the first chapter
the first half is signed by Deleuze and the second by his
' interlocutor', Claire Parnet. In the other chapters the halves
are unsigned and it is no longer possible to extricate the
individual contributions.
The book is therefore not an ' interview' or a 'conversation'
- although it has elements of both. It grows in many direc-
tions, without an overall ordering principle. To use Deleuze's
terms it is the book as war-machine, the book as ' rhizome' .
There is no hierarchy of root, trunk and branch, but a
multi plicity of interconnected shoots going off in all directions.
It is therefore both an explanation and an exemplification of
' Deleuzian pluralism'.
These ' dialogues' are themselves offshoots of Deleuze's
famous seminar at the University ofVincennes (where Claire
Parnet was a regular participant). This took place every
\
XII
DiaLogues
Tuesday morning, in a tiny seminar room, choked wi th smoke,
where only those who arrived an hour early would find a seat.
Deleuze's 'explorations' would be informal and far-ranging wi th
frequent questions and interruptions. Discussions would range
from Spinoza to modem music, from Chinese metallurgy to
bird-song, from linguistics to gang warfare . . . The rhi zome
would grow, distinctions would proliferate. It was up to the
participants to 'correct out' the dualisms by which Deleuze was
travelling, ' to arri ve at the magic formula we all seek,
PLURALISM = MONISM, by passing through all the
dualisms which are the enemy, the altogether necessary
enemy'.
1
These processes can be seen at work here.
This book itself 'grows from the middle' of the remarkable
series of works produced by Deleuze and Felix Guattari during
the J 970s: Anti-Oedipus ( J 972),
2
Kojka: Toward a Minor Literature
(1 975),
3
Rhi.tome (1976)
4
and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).5 Of all
these works Dialogues is the most ' personal' and the most im-
mediately accessible. All of them will soon be available in trans-
lation. The English-speaking reader will, for the fi rst time, have
an opportuni ty to form a proper assessment of a radical and
original attempt to ' think' an active pluralism. Although this
attempt operates against a background of a French intellectual
life which is already becoming curiously dated it also has im-
portant links with English ways of thinking. These links ar e
made explicit in the discussion of the superiori ty of Anglo-
American literature in Chapter 2. Thus Deleuze appears from
this book as an empiricist and pragmatist of a particular type:
not a ' passive pragmatist' measuring things against practice but
a 'constructive' pragmatist whose aim is ' the manufacture of
materials to harness forces, to think the unthinkable'.6
We would like to thank Professor Deleuze for his assista nce
with the translation. We have sought to translate 'key terms' in a
way which is consistent with the recent translations of all his
works. We would like to thank Brian Massumi, the translator of
A Thousand Plateaus, for his suggestions and comments.
We have followed earlier translations in rendering agencement
Translators' Introduction Xlll
' 7 The French word has both an active and a
as 'assemblage. f bl' g or arranging' as well as the
. 'a way o assem 10
passtve sense, , The important term mot
. ' d ing or arrangement . . ' d f
resulung or er m lt Its li teral meaning ts wor o
d'ordre caused us some dt lieu. y.. 'slogan' Professor Deleuze
' b the usual trans atlon IS . h'
order ut . , h' h h'ghlighted the relauons 1p to
wanted a tra nslauon w e las in mot de passe [password])'.
the word or at least to lang g ( d' This is also the trans-
We decided on Massumi. . '
lation mdependently . s yusually translated as ' refram
The French word nto':;"'el e !covers the repeated theme of a
in the musical an .a sowith Professor Deleuze we chose
bird's .. After most appropriate English rende-
the word ntornello as t e of compounds of the verb
b k kes frequent use .
ri ng. The oo rna . me or devenir-animal. The sense IS
devenir such as devemr-fem ' here ' being woman' IS
. h' h ' becomes woman w
of somethmg w tc in but rather of a ' pure woman be-
the result of the g b' t We have therefore trans-
comi ng'' without subJeCt or r.o . le 'woman-becoming' .
h unds as tor examp , r.
Ia ted sue compo ' d ' mplyt'ng that something, tOr
. ld b nterprete as I
Thts shou not e ' . ' Professor Deleuze has pro-
'woman', IS to explain his use of
Vlded a o e have rovided some further ex-
the term heccelty r. t which are indicated by an
planations in translators tootno e
asterisk (*). II h ho have given us advice
ld lik to thank a t ose w .
We wou e . . h' n Paul Patton and m
and assistance, includmg and Richard
particular Rober t Galeta. aro me . d us but had to suffer
. .
1
helped and encourage
Wtlltams on Y mfortabl close quarters.
the translatmg process a t unco y
Hugh Tomlinson
Barbara Habberjam
\
1
A Conversation: What is it?
What is it For?
I
It is very hard to 'explain oneselr- an interview, a dialogue, a
conversation. Most of the time, when someone asks me a
question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I
don't have anything to say. Questions are invented, like any-
thing else. If you aren't allowed to invent your questions, with
elements from all over the place, from never mind where, if
people ' pose' them to you, you haven't much to say. The art of
constructing a problem is very important: you invent a prob-
lem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. None of
this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion.
Even reflection, whether it's alone, or between two or more, is
not enough. Above all, not refl ection. Objections are even
worse. Every time someone puts an obj ection to me, I want to
say: ' OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have
never contributed anything. It's the same when I am asked a
general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it's to
get out, to get out of it. Many people think that it is only by
going back over the question that it's possible to get out of it.
' What is the position with philosophy? Is it dead? Are we going
beyond it?' It's very trying. They won' t stop returning to
the question in order to get out of it. But getting out never
happens like that. Movement always happens behind the
thinker's back, or in the moment when he blinks. Getting out
is already achieved, or else it never will be. Questions are
generall y aimed at a future (or a past). The future of women,
the future of the revolution, the future of philosophy, etc. But
\
2 Dialogues
during this time, while you turn in circles among these
questions, there are becomings which are silently at work,
which arc almost imperceptible. We think too much in terms
of history, whether personal or universal. Becomings belong to
geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits.
There is a woman-becoming which is not the same as women,
their past and their future, and it is essential that women enter
this becoming to get out of their past and their future, their
history. There is a revolutionary-becoming which is not the
same as the future of the revolution, and which does not
necessaril y happen through the militants. There is a
philosophy-becoming which has nothing to do with the
history of philosophy and which happens through those whom
the history of philosophy does not manage to classify.
To become is never to imitate, nor to 'do like', nor to
conform to a model, whether it's ofjustice or of truth. There is
no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at
or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms
which are exchanged. The question 'What are you becoming?'
is particularly stupid. for as someone becomes, what he is
becoming changes as much as he does himself. Becomings are
not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double
capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two
reigns. Nuptials are always against nat ure. Nuptials are the
opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines:
question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This
could be what a conversation is - simpl y the outline of a
becoming. The wasp and the orchid provide the example. The
orchid seems to form a wasp image, but in fact there is a
wasp-becoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the
wasp, a double capture since 'what' each becomes changes no
less than 'that which' becomes. The wasp becomes part of the
orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the
orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. One and the
same becoming, a single bloc of becoming, or, as Remy
Chauvin says, an 'a-parallel evolution of two beings who have
w.'Lat is it? What is it for? 3 A Conversation: n
. to do with one another'. The.re are
not hmg man which do not consist in playmg the
o d the animal only meet on the
h t smce man an . ,. .
dog or t e ca ' t "cal deterritona tzauon.
f mmon but asymme n .
trajectory o a co ' b" d . n this music there IS . a
h is like Mozart s .s. I music-becoming of the bird,
bird-becoming, but caug t m 'ngle bloc an a-parallel
ngle becommg, a Sl '
the two formmg a Sl h b t 'a confidence with no pas-
evolution - not an exc ange, u tor on Mozart says; in short,
sible interlocutor', as a com menta
a conversation. h h' which is the most im-
. t!hey are t e t mg . rfl
Becommgs - h" h n only be contained m a 1 e
'bl they are acts w IC ca .
perceptt e, . le S les are not constructions,
and expressed m a sty . tyl I .tis not the words whtch
des ofhfe n stye
1
1
.r .
more than are mo . h h thms and figures. In ue It
count, nor the sentences, nor t. e lyes nor the consequences.
h . nor the pnnctp , d '
is not t e stones, d "th another. If you on t
I
P
lace one wor WI .
You can a ways re . take another put another m
f d 'tsutt you
like that one, 1 lt oesn k, this effort everyone can
If h one of us ma es ,
its place. eac d h e is scarcely any reason to
d another an t er d
understan one . b" . There are no literal wor s,
. to ratse o d
ask quesuons or ( II etaphors are sullied wor s,
. h metaphors a m d
netther are t ere I inexact words to es-
h ) There are on Y
or else make t em so . te extraordinary words,
h. ctl y Let us crea d
ignatc somet mg exa . the most ordinary use an
on condition that they be pubt to de to exist in the same way
h h y designate e rna . 1
that t e enuty t e . Toda we have at our dlsposa
as the most common ObJeCt. yf "ting T here are ones
f d. and perhaps o wn
new ways o rea mg,
1
e get the feeling that
which are bad and rotten. e, wthat a Journalist will
. tten for t e review
some books are wn .
1
er even any need for a
have to produce, so that there IS ;o must read that! It's
review, but only for empty wor s 'd eadlng the book and
' II ") to avo1 r
Go on! you see. But the good ways of reading
puttmg the arucle together.
0
ld treat a record
a book as you w u
today succeed m treating e you watch any
fil a TV programm ' you listen to, a 1 m or
\
4 Dialogues
treatment of the book which claims for. .
attention of another k" d It a specal respect - an
fi
. . 10 - comes from th
JOitlVely condemns the book Th , ano _er era and de-
or understanding concept . ere s no questton of difficul ty
s are exactly Jik d
tmages, they are intensities h" h . e soun s, colours or
W IC SUit you .
acceptable or aren't acce t bl p or not, whtch are
h
. pa e. opph"l h
not mg to understand h. I osop y. There's
say what a style is It lOg to interpret. I should like to
'T . ongs to people of wh
say, hey have no style , Th" . om. you normally
IS IS not a . ry
nor a reflected organization sgn mg structure,
nor an orchestration nor , a s_pontaneous inspiration
a tt e ptece of '
assemblage an assembl f mustc. It is an
. ' age o enuncat" A
agmg to stammer in one's o J t ton. style is man-
cause there has to be a ne d fcwn anguage. I t is difficult, be-
e or such stam N
stammerer in one's speech b t b . mermg. ot being a
itself Being like a fco . ' u . emg a stammerer oflanguage
. regner m one's 1
structiOg a line of flight Th . anguage. Con-
K
e most striking
1
are atka Beckett Gh . L examp es for me
L
. , ' erasJm uca and God
uca IS a great poet amon th ard. Gherasim
gious stammering his ow g he_ invented a prodi-
poems in front hundn.d e gave public readings of his
re people a d
an event belonging to no h J ' n yet Jt was an event
sc oo or move h" '
pass through these two hu d d Th" ment, w ch would
th
o n re 0 lOgs n
IOk, nor along the paths you think. ever pass where you
You can always object that we .
examples, Kalka the Czech J . _choosmg favourabl e
B k
. . ew wntmg 10 Ger h .
ec ett wntiOg English d F man, t e Insh
. . an rench L f R
ongm, and even the Swiss Godard , uC:, o. . umanian
problem for any of them We . And ThJs s not the
single language we must .h be blmgual even in a
ave a m10or Ja . .
own languge we must nguage IOSJde our
J
create a m
anguage. Multilingualism . mor use of our own
J
IS not merel y th
severa systems each of h" h e property of
. . . w JC would be ho . .
H IS pnmarily the line of fli h m Itself:
each system by stop . . gfi t or of vanaton which affects
. pmg Jt rom be h
speakmg like an I rishman or a R _ng . omogeneous. Not
umaOJan m a language other
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 5
than one's own, but on the contrary speaking in one' s own
language like a foreigner. Proust says: ' Great literature is
written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we
attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is
oft en a mistranslation. But in great li terature all our mistrans-
lations resul t in beauty.'
1
This is the good way to read: all
mistransla tions are good - always provided that they do not
consist in interpretations, but relate to the use of the book,
that they multiply its use, that they create yet another
language inside its language. 'Great literature is written in a
sort of foreign language ... ' That is the definition of style.
Here agai n it is a question ofbecoming. People always think of
a majoritarian future (when I am grown up, when I have
power). Whereas the problem is that of a minoritarian-
becoming, not pretending, not playing or imitating the child,
the madman, the woman, the animal, the stammerer or the
foreigner, but becoming all these, in order to invent new forces
or new weapons.
Life is like that too. In life there is a sort of awkwardness, a
delicacy of health, a frailty of consti tution, a vital stammering
which is someone' s charm. Charm is the source of life just as
style is the source of writing. Life is not your history - those
who have no charm have no life, it is as though they are dead.
But the charm is not the person. It is what makes people be
grasped as so many combinations and so many unique
chances from which such a combination has been drawn. It is
a throw of the dice which necessarily wins, since it affirms
chance sufficientl y instead of detaching or mutilating chance
or reducing it to probabilities. Thus through each fragile
combination a power of life is affirmed with a strength, an
obstinacy, an unequalled persistence in the being. It is strange
how grea t thinkers have a fragile personal life, an uncertain
health, at the same time as they carry life to the state of
absolute power or of'Great Health' . T hese are not people, but
the figure of their own combination. Charm and style are poor
words; we should find others, replace them. Charm gives life a
\
6 Dialogues
non-personal power, above individuals; at the same time, style
gives writing an external end [fin] - which goes beyond what
is written. And this is the same thing: wri ting does not have its
end in itself precisely because life is not something personal.
The onl y aim [/in] of writing is life, through the combinations
which it draws. This is the opposite of ' neurosis', in which life
is constantl y mutilated, debased, personalized, mortified, and
in which writing takes itself as its own end. Nietzsche, the
opposite of the neurotic, very much alive but with fragile
health, writes:
I t sometimes seems as though the ar tist, and the
philosopher in particular, is only a chance in his time . ..
nature, which never makes a leap, has made its one leap in
creati ng them, and a leap of joy moreover, for nature then
feels that for the first time it has reached its goal - where it
realises it has to unlearn having goals and that it has played
the game of life and becoming with too hjgh stakes. This
knowledge transfigures nature, and a gentle eve-
ning-weariness, that which men call ' beauty', reposes upon
its face.
2
When you work, you are necessaril y in absolute solitude. You
cannot have disciples, or be part of a school. The only work is
moonlighting and is clandestine. But it is an extremely
populous solitude. Populated not with dreams, phantasms or
plans, but with encounters. An encounter is perhaps the same
thing as a becoming, or nuptials. I t is from the depth of this
solitude that you can make any encounter whatsoever. You
encounter people (and someti mes without knowing them or
ever having seen them) but also movements, ideas, events,
entities. All these thjngs have proper names, but the proper
name does not designate a person or a subj ect. It designates
an effect, a zigzag, something which passes or happens be-
tween two as though under a potential difference: the 'Com-
pton effect', the ' Kelvin effect'. We said the same thing about
becomings: it is not one term which becomes the other, but
A Conversation: ""'
1
,u'hat is it? What is it for? 7
. 1 becoming which is not
each encounters the nothing to d9 with one
common to the two, .smce y h two which has its own
h" h s between t e ' Th' .
'IOOther, but w IC I . a parallel evolution. IS IS
a bloc of becommg, an the orchid: not even
r the double capture, the ':asph e or something which
I , . h ld be m t e on , b
something whtc wou "f ' t had to be exchanged, e
would be in the lis the two, the
mingled, but h r direction. To encounter IS to
t
wo and which flows m anot eh . no method for finding
, l but t ere ts . f
find, to capture, to stea ' . n Stealing is the opposite
other than a Ions: . or doing like. Capture IS
. . ymg
1
m1tanng, . hat
plagianzmg, cop ' theft a double-theft, and It IS t.
always a double-capture, . 1 but an asymmetncal
methmg mutua ' . , d
which creates not so . ti Is always 'outside an
llel evoluuon, nup a ' .
block, an a-para. . h "t ould be a conversauon.
' between' . So tt hls IS w at I w '
Y I am a thief of thoughts
es, f 1
not, I pray, a stealer .o sou s
I have built an' rebuilt
upon what is waitin'
for the sand on the beaches
carves many castles
on what has been opened
before my time .
tory a hne
a word, a tune, a s ' . d
keys in the wind t' unlock m: n:::ckyard ai r
an' t'grant my closet thoug ts
it is not of me t Sit an ponder
wonderin' an' wastin' time b th nk
h. k' , of thoughts that haven' t een u
t m m ' b en dreamt
thinkin' of dreams that haven t e
an' new 1deas t at ave . h h n' t been wrote
an' new words t' fit into rhyme ( ... )
an' not t' worry about the new rules
for they ain' t been made yet
\
8 Dialogues
an' t'shout my singin' m d
k . ' h m
nowiO t at it is me an' my k' d
will make those rules 10
If the people of tomorrow . . .
really need the rules of today
rally ' round all . '
the ld . you prosecutm attorneys
wor IS but a courtroom
yes
I the defendants better ' n you
an ' while you' re busy prosecutin'
were busy whistlin'
cleanin' up the courtroom
s.weepin' sweepin'
listenin, listen in'
win kin' t' one another
careful
careful
your spot is comin' up soon.3
How proud and wonderful - also m . .
poem. It says it all As a teach I h odest - IS this Bob Dylan
a course as Dylan. orga . . er s ould like to be able to give
th
mzes a song as a t . h"
ra er than author A d h . , s oms mg producer
suddenly, with his sh?uld begin as he does
triving, and yet imp . . as ' With a technique of
rovlsiOg each det 1 Th
plag1arist, but also the opposite of a ma:: e opposite of a
preparation, yet no method er or a model. A very
Nuptials without couples . , .nor rules, nor recipes.
which I put everyth" I or conJugalJty. Having a bag into
mg encounter p d d
put in a bag Find ' rovt e that I am also
I . . mg, encountering ste r .
u atiOg, recognizing and . d . , a mg mstead of reg-
opposite of the encounter ju d .. For recognizing is the
people, and it is not a good. u IS the profession of many
h h pro1eSSJOn but it . aJ h
w IC many people put . . B , IS so t e use to
than a judge. The more etter to be_ a road-sweeper
more one gives lessons no s ?een fooled m one's life, the
. one IS as good as a Stalinist 10
A Conversation: What is it? What is il for? 9
giving lessons in non-Stalinism and pronouncing 'new rules' .
There is a whole race of j udges, and the history of thought is
like that of a court, it lays claim to a court of Pure Reason, or
else Pure Faith . . . This is why people speak so readily in the
name and in the place of others, and why they like questions
so much, are so clever at asking them and replying to them.
There are also those who demand to be judged, if only to be
recognized as guilty. I n justice they demand conformity, even
if this is to rules which they invent, to a transcendence which
they claim to reveal or to feelings which motivate them.
Justice and correctness are bad ideas. Compare Godard's
formula; not a correct image, just an image [pas une imagejuste,
j uste une image]. It is the same in philosophy as in a fllm or a
song: no correct ideas, j ust ideas [pas d'idies justes, justes des
idees]. just ideas: this is the encounter, the becoming, the theft
and the nuptials, this ' between-two' of solitudes. When
Godard says he would like to be a production studio, he is
obviously not trying to say that he wants to produce his own
films or he wants to edit his own books. He is trying to say just
ideas, because, when it comes down to it, you are aU alone,
and yet you are like a conspiracy of criminals. You are no
longer an author, you are a production studio, you have never
been more populated. Being a 'gang' - gangs live through the
worst dangers; forming judges, courts, schools, families and
conjugalities again. But what is good in a gang, in principle, is
that each goes about his own business while encountering
others, each brings in his loot and a becoming is sketched out
- a bloc starts moving - which no longer belongs to anyone,
but is ' between' everyone, like a little boat which children let
slip and lose, and is stolen by others. In the TV conversations
6 limes 2 what were Godard and Mieville doing if not making
the richest use of their solitude, using it as a means of en-
counter, making a line or bloc shoot between two people,
producing all the phenomena of a double capture, showing
the conjunction AND is, neither a union, nor a
JUxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a
\
I 0 Dialogues
broken li ne which always sets off at right angles, a son of
acti ve and creative line of flight? AND ... AND ... AND ...
You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct.
You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in
another area, so that something passes between the two which
is neither in one nor the other. Now, one does not genera ll y
find this idea alone; a chance is needed, or else someone gives
you one. You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar
with a particular a rea, but t9 pick up this or that in areas
which are very different. This is better than the 'cut-up'. I t is
rather a ' pick-me- up or ' pick-up'
4
" - in the dictionary =
collecting up, chance, restarting of the motor, getting on to the
wavelength; and then the sexual connotation of the word.
Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabi li ties- at least
linguistic ones - and not a procedure of drawing lots or a
single chance which combines the heterogeneous elements.
For example, I am trying to explain that things, people, are
made up of very varied lines, and that they do not necessaril y
know which li ne they are on or where they should make the
line which they are traci ng pass; in short, there is a whole
geography in people, with rigid li nes, supple lines, lines of
flight, etc. I see my friend J ean-Pierre, who explains to me, in
connection with somethi ng else, that a monetary balance im-
plies a line between two sorts of operations which are appar-
entl y simple: but in fact economists can make this line pass
anywhere, so that they haven't the slightest idea where to
make it pass. This is an encounter, but with whom? With
J ean-Pierre, with a fi eld, wi th a word, with a gesture? I always
worked in this way with Fanny. Her ideas always seized me
from behind, coming from far away in another direction, so
that we crossed all the more like the signals from two lamps.
In her own work, she came upon Lawrence's poems about
tortoises. I do not know anything about tortoises and yet that
changes everyt hi ng for animal-becomings; it is not clear that
any animal whatsoever is caught up in these becomings; what
. . What is it? What is it for?
A Conversatzon.
11
. ffi ? Lawrence says: ' If I am a giraffe
about tortoises or gra es. . b t me are well-trained
r h le who wn te a ou
and t he Eng IS peop h nimals are too different.
dogs, nothing any me, you don't like
You say t hat you hke me, . I that I am , Our enemieS
. . I detest the amma .
vou insunctlve y . I . ncounter with someone
dogs. But what precise or with t he animals
you like? Is it an encounter WI "th the ideas which take you
who come to populate or WI the sounds which run
nts which move you,
over, the moveme d ou separate t hese t hings? I can
through you? And how y he has said this or that to me, set
talk t as long as I have not been able
it out as I see lt. This Is. not g f nds hammered out, of de-
nter t his set o sou f d
really to encou . II de of tinder and fire, o eep
. . s of 1deas a ma h" h
CISIVC gesture , f 1 hter and smiles w IC
. d dden closure o aug r
1
attenuon an su ,h moment when one tee s
I b
' dangerous' at t e very
one fee s to e . combination whose proper
this set as a umque
tenderness- I A man without references, says
name would be Foucau t.
1
. nt J ean-Pierre, the
E ld the finest comp Jme r.
Fran!tOIS wa -
1
r. d who has never lett
fj . d h m I have never ett an .
onl y n en w o "lh tte always walking, movmg,
And J erome that Sl oue ' . 1
me. . . ' . h rfl and whose generosity, ove,
penetrated to the core Wit
1
e, ONAH In each of us
t source J
was nourished at a secrc . . ' ned agai nst ourselves.
. . ascesis m part tur
there 1s, as 1t were, an ' "b flora and fauna. We
We arc deserts, but them in other
. . d nng these tn es, ar
pass out ume m or e g others to prosper.
. .d f orne and encouragm
ways, gcttmg n o s do not undermine the
And all these clans, all these ontrary they inhabit
desert, which is our there has always
it, they pass through It, o:er lt. d" d against himself. The
been a sort of wild rodeo, m part l identity our
. o 1eself IS our on y ,
desert, experimentation on
1
. ' h. h habit us Then
r 11 h binatJOnS W IC m .
single chance tOr a t e com b are even more
ld ' Y re not masters, ut you .
we a re to , ou a h rk d to be somethmg
suffocating. ' We should have so muc 1 e
else.
\
12 Dialogues
I was taught by two professors, whom I liked and admired a
lot, Alquie and Hyppolite. Everything turned out badl y. One
had long white hands and a stammer which might have been a
legacy of childhood, or there to hide a native accent, and
which was harnessed to the service of Cartesian dualisms. The
other had a powerful face with unfinished features, and
rhyt hmically beat out Hegelian triads with his fi st, hanging
his words on the beats. At the Liberation we were stiU
strangely stuck in the rustory of philosophy. We simply
plunged into Hegel, Husser! and Heidegger; we threw
ourselves like puppies into a scholasticism worse than that of
the Middle Ages. Fortunatel y there was Sart re. Sartre was our
Outside, he was really the breath of fresh air from the
backyard (and it was oflittle importance to know exactl y what
his relationship with Heidegger was, from the point of view of
a history to come). Among all the Sorbonne's probabili ties, it
was his unique combination which gave us the strength to
tolerate the new restoration of order. And Sartre has never
stopped being that, not a model, a method or an example, but
a little fresh air- a gust of air even when he had j ust been to
the Cafe Flore - an intellectual who singularly changed the
situation of the intellectual. It is idiotic to wonder whether
Sartre was the beginning or the end of something. Like all
creative things and people, he is in the middle, he grows from
the middle. However, at that time I did not feel drawn
towards existentialism or towards phenomenology; r am not
quite sure why, but it was already history when you got there,
too much method, imi tation, commentary and interpretation
- except Sartre. So, after the Liberation, the history of
philosophy tightened itself around us- without our reali zing it
- under the pretext of opening up a future of thought, which
would also be the most ancient thought. The ' Heidegger
question' did not seem to me to be ' Is he a bit of a Nazi?'
(obviously, obviously) but ' What was his r6Je in this new
injection of history of philosophy?' No one takes thought very
seriously, except those who claim to be thinkers or
u'hat is it? What is il for? 13
A Conversation: m
. But that doesn't stop it from
philosophers by professtan. f wer - or its being an effect of
. . n apparatuses o po ' D take me
havmg Its ow r when it tells people: on t .
its apparatus of powe. . ce I o-l ve you conformity,
' I thmk for you, sm o b "t 11
seriously, because . ' to all of which you may su mt. a
norms and rules, an not my business, ,not tm-
the more as you say. d their pure theones.
portant, it's for always been the agent of
The history of phtlosop y . h ght It has played the
"I h and even m t ou . d PI
power in pht osop y, hink without having rea ato,
represser's role: how can t er and so-and-so's book about
Descartes, Kant and f intimidation which manu-
t
hem? A formidable sc ooh o b t which also makes those
1 thoug t - u h h
factures tsts m all the more to this specialism w tc
who stay outstde conform h lied philosophy has been
ofthoug t ca fJ
they despise. An tmage . ffectively stops people rom
formed historically and l.t e h" . th the State is not solely
P
h"l hy's relations tp WI b
thinking. I osop tl most philosophers have een
due to the fact that recen y h h" fact has had a very
r (althoug t I S 1
'public pro1essors . d Germany} . The rea-
. . "fi ce m France an . l
different stgm tcan ck For thought borrows I ts proper y
tionship goes further ba . beautiful substantial or
. I . from the state as ' S
philosophtca tmage . operly spiritual tate, as
. . . It mvents a pr .
subjecove mtenonty. . . no means a dream, smce tt
an absolute state, w_htch IS b_y d Hence the importance of
ffi
1 m the mm
operates e ecttve y . hod question and answer,
notions such as always having
judgement, or o J of themes like those of a
"d H ce the 1mportance f
correct I eas. en . f h nderstanding, a court o
f
. . n enqUtry o t e u .
republic o sptnts, a . h sters of the lntenor
' . ht' of thought wit mmt h
reason, a pure ng h Philosophy is shot throug
and bureaucrats of pure thoug t. ffi . I language of a Pure
with the project of becoming the o ICiaft ms to the goals of
State. The exercise of thus con _or and to the re-
h dommant meanmgs .
the real State, to t e . d N"etzsche said everythmg
quircments of the estabhshed or er.
1
, G Everything which
. . 'S h hauer Educator
on this pomt tn c open
\
14 Dialogues
belongs to a thought without image - nomadism, the war-
machine, becomings, nuptials against nature, capture and
thefts, interregnums, minor languages or stammering of
language, etc. - is crushed and denounced as a nuisance. Of
course, this role of represser of thought can be played by
disciplines other than philosophy and its history. I t can even
be said that today the history of philosophy has gone bankrupt
and that 'the State no longer needs the sanction of
Philosophy'. But keen competitors have already taken its
place. Epistemology has taken up the reins from the history of
philosophy. Marxism brandishes a judgement of history, or
even a people's tribunal - which are even more disturbing
than the others. Psychoanalysis increasingly concerns itself
with the ' thought' function and - not without reason - allies
itself with linguistics. These are the new apparatuses of power
in thought itself, a nd Marx, Freud and Saussure make up a
strange, three-headed Represser, a dominant major language.
To interpret, to transform, to utter are the new forms of
'correct' ideas. Even Chomsky's syntactic marker is primarily
a marker of power. Linguistics triumphed at the same time as
information was being developed as power, and was imposing
its image of language and of thought, consistent with the
transmission of 'order-words'
7
and the organization of re-
dundancies. There is not really much point in wondering
whether philosophy is dead, when many other discipli nes are
assuming its function. We have no right to lay claim to
madness, since madness itself passes through psychoanalysis
and linguistics reunited, since i t is imbued with correct ideas,
with a strong culture or a history without becoming, since it
has its clowns, its professors and its little chiefs.
So I began with the history of philosophy - when it was still
being prescribed. For my part, I could not see any way of
extracting myself. I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms
and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the
negation. But I liked writers who seemed to be part of the
history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect,
A Conversation: rrrt urLat is it? What is it f or? 15
. S inoza Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson.
or altogether: hi,losophy has its chapter on
Of course, every hlsto;i k I p have their place there, but in
empiricism: and. er e which completely dis-
Hume there IS ve.ry ower a theory and
.. . m glvmg tt a new p ' b
places ' f h AND which was to be pursued y
practice of o t which remains underground or
Russell an.d WhJt.ehead, h reat classifications, even when
marginal m relation to t e f logic and epistemology.
. . new conception o .
they mspre a I ht up in French-style history
f rse was a so caug .
Bergson, o cou ' . h. h re is something whJch cannot
h.l hy a nd yet m Jm t e k b
ofp I osop ' . bl d h. to provide a shoe ' to e a
be assimilated, which ena e the object of so many
rall ying point th: of the theme of
hatreds: and this IS no d ctice of becomings of all
f the theory an pra d.
duration, as o I . li . ti s And it is easy to ere It
kinds, of coexistent mufthlp Cl e: the Cartesian succession;
. h h lace o onour m .
Spinoza Wit t e p f h lace in all directions, there IS
except that he bulges o t f his coffin so powerfully,
. who ra1ses t e I 0 .
no hvmg corpse f s , It was on Spmoza
dl ' I not one o your .
crying so lou y am . sl accordi ng to the norms of the
that I worked t he most sen ouh y than any other gave me
. f h. l phy _ but e more .
history o p I oso . behind each time you read him,
the feeling of a gust of from makes ou mount. We have not
of a witch's broom which h: yd
1
myself no more than
yet begun to understand Spmofza, ran .I constitution and yet
h AIJ h th.nkers are o a ragt e '
1
ot ers. t esc
1
bl rr. They proceed on y
shot through with an e have a sort of cult
through positive and

to the Academy
life (I fantasize about wntmg a me . , book cannot end
of the Moral Sciences to show that san invention,
with the description of the plague, an t a Jd Ito show that a
Ch ho wante
a falsification of the nsuans w d h) These
d t rror an angUJs
maleficent thi nker en .
10
ach other _ apart from
thinkers have few relattonshps Wlth e h One
. d yet they do have t em.
Nietzsche and Spmoza - an h at different
might say that something happens between t em,
\
16 Dialogues
speeds and with different intensities, which is not in one or
but _trul y in an ideal space, which is no longer a part of
htstory, still less a dialogue among the dead, but a n inter-
stellar conversation, between very irregular stars whose
different becomings form a mobile bloc which it be a
case of capt urin?, an inter-flight, light-years. Then, I had paid
off my debts, Ntetzsche and Spinoza had released me. And I
wrote yet more books on my own account. I believe that what
concerned me, in any case, was to describe this exercise of
thought, whether in a writer, or for itself, in so far as it is
?pposed to the traditional image which philosophy has pro-
Jected, has erected in thought in order to subjugate it and
prevent i_t from But 1 do not wish to begin these
all ?ver aga_m. I have already tried to say all that
m a letter to a fnend, Mtchel Cressole, who had written some
very kind, and very mischievous, things about me.
encounter with Felix Guattari changed a lot of things.
Feli x already had a long history of political involvement and
of psychia tric_work. He was not a philosopher by training, but
he had a philosopher-becoming all the more for this, and
many too. He never stopped. Few people
have gtven me the Impression as he did of moving at each
moment; not changing, but moving in his entirety with the aid
of a gesture he ':as making, of a word which he was saying, of
a vocal sound, like a kaleidescope forming a new combination
every time. Al ways the same Felix, yet one whose proper
something which was happening, and not a
subjeCt. Feli x was a man of the group, ofbands or tri bes, and
yet he is a. alone, a populated by all these groups
and all h1s fnends, all h1s becomings. Many people have
worked in pairs: the Goncourt brothers, Erckmann-Chatri an,
Laurel and Hardy. But there are no rules, there is no general
formula. In my earlier books, I tried to describe a certain
exercise ?f thought; but _de_scribing it was not yet exercising
thought m that way. {Stmllarl y, proclaiming ' Long live the
multiple' is not yet doing it, one must do the multipl e. And
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? l 7
ther is it enough to say, ' Down with genres'; one must
net , ,
effectively write in such a way that there are no ,
etc.) With Felix, all that became possible, even tf we fa1led.
\ \'e were only two, but what was important for_ us was less our
working together than this strange fact of between the
two of us. We stopped being 'aut hor' . And these_ between-the-
' reflerred back to other people, who were dtfferent on one
tWOS d
side from on the other. The desert expanded, but_ m so 01ng
became more populous. This had nothing to wtth a school,
th processes of recognition, but much to do w1th encounters.
WI I .
And all these stories of becomings, of nupua s agamst nature,
of a-parallel evolution, of bilingualism, of theft of
were whatt I had with Felix. I stole Felix, and I he dtd th_e
same for me. You know how we work - I repeat tt because tt
seems to me to be important - we do not work together, w_e
work between the two. In these conditions, as. soon as_ t_here tS
this type of multiplicity, there is politics, rrucro-pobucs. As
Felix says: before Being there is politics. We don' t work, we
negotiate. We were never in the same rhythm, we were
out of step: I understood and could make use of w?at
said to me six months later; he understood what I satd to htm
immediately, too quickly for my - he was already
elsewhere. From time to time we have wn tten about th_e same
idea and have noticed later that we have not grasped tt at all
in the same way: witness ' bodies without organs' . Or
another example. Felix was worki ng on black thts
astronomical idea fascinated him. The black hole ts what
captures you and does not let you get out. How do you get out
of a black hole? How do you transmit signals from the
or a black hole? 1 was working, rather, on a white wall: what ts
a white wall a screen how do you plane down the wall and
make a line flight We had not the tw_o ideas
together, but we noticed that each was of t_ts
accord towards the other, to produce somethmg whtch, m-
dced, was neither in the one nor the other . For black holes on
a white wall are in fact a face, a broad face wi th white cheeks,
\
18 Dialogues
and pierced with black holes. Now it no longer seems like a
face, it is rather the assemblage or the abstract machine which
is to produce the face. Suddenly the problem bounces back
and it is political: what are the societies, the civilizations
which need to make this machine work, that is, to produce, to
'overcode' the whole body and head with a face, and to what
end? I t is not obvious, the beloved's face, the boss's face, the
faceification of the physical and social body . . . Here is a
multiplicity with at least three dimensions astronomical
' . '
aesthetic, politicaL In none of the cases are we making a
metaphorical use of it: we don' t say that is ' like' black holes in
astronomy, that is ' like' a white canvas in painting. We are
using deterritorialized terms, that is, terms which are torn
from their area, in order to reterritorialize another notion, the
'face', 'faceity' as social function. And, still worse, people keep
on being sunk in black holes, pinioned on a white wall. This is
what being identified, labelled, recognized is: a central com-
puter functioning as a black hole and sweeping across a white
wall without contours. We are talking li terall y. In fact,
astronomers envisage the possibility that, in the centre of a
globular cluster, all sorts of black holes will converge to form a
single hole of a fairly large mass ... White wall - black hole:
this, for me, is a typical example of the way in which a work is
assembled betwen us, neither union nor juxtaposition, but a
broken line which shoots between two, proliferation, tentacles.
This is a pick-up
8
method. No, ' method' is a bad word. But
pick-up as procedure is Fanny's word. Her onl y fear was that
it was too much of a pun. Pick-up is a stammering. I t is onl y
vali? in opposition to Burroughs' cut-up: there is no cutting,
foldmg and turning down, but multiplications according to
the growing dimensions. The pick-up or the double theft, the
a-parallel evolution, does not happen between persons, it
happens between ideas, each one being deterritoriali zed in the
other, following a line or lines which are neither in one nor the
other, and which carry off a ' bloc' . I do not wish to refl ect on
what is past. At present, Felix and I are finishing a large book.
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 19
It is nearly finished, and it will be the last. Afterwards we will
see. We will do something else. I should therefore like to talk
about what we are doing now. There is not one of these ideas
which did not come from Felix, from Felix's side (black hole,
micro-politics, deterritorialization, abstract machine, etc.).
Now is the moment to exercise the method, or never: you and
1 we can make use of it in another bloc or on another side,
your own ideas, so that something is produced which
doesn't belong to either of us, but is between 2, 3, 4 ... n. No
longer is it ' x explains x, signed x', but ' Deleuze explains
Guattari , signed you', 'x explains y,. z'. th;.con-
versation would become a real functiOn. On the stde of' ...
One must multi ply the sides, break every circle in favour of
the polygons.
G.D.
II
If the question and answer procedure is not suitable it's for
very simple reasons. The tone of questions can vary: there is a
clever/treacherous tone, or on the contrary, a servile tone, or
agai n, an equal-to-equal tone. You hear them every day on
television. But it is always like the Luca poem (I don't quote
exactly): Shooters and shot ... front to front .. . back to
back ... front to back ... back to back and to front. What-
ever the tone, the process of question and answer is made to
nourish dual isms. For example, in a literary interview, there is
first of all the interviewer/ interviewee dualism, and then,
beyond, the man/writer, life/work dualisms in the interviewee
himself, and agai n, the dualism between the work and the
int ention or the meaning of the work. And when it's a col-
loquium or a round table it's the same. Dualisms no longer
relate to unities, but to successive choices: are you white or
black, man or woman, rich or poor, etc.? Do you take the left
20 Dialogues
half or the right hall? There is always a binary machine which
governs the distribution of roles and which means that all the
answers must go through preformed questions, since the
questions are already worked out on the basis of the answers
assumed to be probable according to the dominant meanings.
Thus a grille is constituted such that everything which does
not pass through the grille cannot be materially understood.)
For example, in a broadcast on prisons the following choices
will be established: jurist/ prison governor, judge/ lawyer,
social worker/ interesting case, the opinion of the ordinary
prisoners who fill the prisons being pushed back outside the
grille or outside the subject. It is in this sense that we are
always ' had' by television, we have lost in advance. Even
when we ar e speaking for ourselves, we always speak in the
place of someone else who will not be able to speak.
You cannot escape being had, possessed or rather dispos-
sessed. Consider the well-known card trick, ' forced choice' .
You want to make someone choose, for example, the king of
hearts. You say first of all: ' Do you prefer red or black?' If he
answers ' Red', you withdraw the black cards from the table; if
he replies ' Black', you take the red cards and again you
withdraw them. You have only to conti nue: ' Do you prefer
hearts or diamonds?' Until ' Do you prefer the king or the
queen of hearts?' The binary machine works in this way, even
when the interviewer is a person of good will. The point is that
the machine goes beyond us and serves other ends.
Psychoanalysis is exemplary in this respect, with its process of
the association of ideas. I swear that the examples that I give
are real, although confidential and non-personal. ( I) A
patient says, ' I want to go off with a hippy group' (groupe
hippie], the manipulator replies, ' Why do you say big pee?'
(gros pipi] . (2) A patient speaks of the Bouches d u Rhone, the
psychoanalyst himself comments, ' Invitation to a journey that
I emphasize with a mother's mouth' (if you say ' mother'
[mere] I keep it and if you say 'sea' [mer] I withdraw it, thus I
win at each move). (3) A depressed patient speaks of his
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 21
memories of the Resistance and of a chief of the network called
Rene. The psychoanalyst says, ' Let us keep Rene.' Re-ni [re-
born] is no longer Resistance, it's Renaissance. And Ren-
aissance, is it I or the mother's womb? Let us keep
' mother' . Oh yes, psychoanalysis is not at all the purloined
letter, it is the forced choice. Where it commands attention, it
is because it gave the binary machine new material and a new
extension, consistent with what we expect of an apparatus of
power. Where it does not command attention it is because
there were other means. Psychoanalysis is a very cold en-
terprise (a culture of death drives and of castration, of the
dirty ' little secret' ) to crush all the patient' s utterances, to
retain only their anaemic double, and to push outside the grid
all that the patient has said about his desires, his experiences
and his assemblages, his politics, his loves and his hates.
There were already so many people, so many priests, so many
representatives who spoke in the name of our conscience, it
was necessary for this race of priests and representatives to
speak in the name of the unconscious.
It is wrong to say that the binary machine exists only for
reasons of convenience. It is said that 'the base 2' is the
easiest. But in fact the binary machine is an important com-
ponent of apparatuses of power. So many dichotomies will be
established that there will be enough for everyone to be
pinned to the wall, sunk in a hole. Even the divergences of
deviancy will be measured according to the degree of binary
choice; you are neither white nor black, Arab then? Or half-
breed? You are neither man nor woman, transvestite then?
This is the white wall/ black hole system. And it is not surpris-
ing that the face has such importance in this system: you must
have the face of your role- in such and such a place among
the possible elementary uni ties, on such and such a level in the
possible successive choices. Nothing is less pdrsonal than the
face. Even the madman must have a face corresponding to
some type which we expect of him. When a schoolteacher has
a strange appearance, we are at this last level of choice, and
/
22 Dialogues
we say: yes, it is the schoolteacher, but, look she is depressed,
or she has gone mad. The base model, first level, is the face of
t he ordinary European of today - what Ezra Pound calls the
ordinary sensual man, Ulysses. All types of face will be de-
termined on t he basis of this model, through successive
dichotomies. If linguistics itself proceeds by dichotomies (cf.
Chomsky's trees where a binary machine works inside
language), if informatics proceeds through the succession of
dual choices, this is not so innocent as one might think. It is
perhaps that information is a myth and t hat language is not
essentially informative. First of all there is a language-face
relationship, and, as Felix says, language is always indexed on
features of the face, features of ' faceicity': ' Look at me when I
speak to you .. .' or 'Lower your eyes ... What? What did
you say, why do you look so glum?' What the linguists call
'distincti ve features' would not even be discernible without
the features of faceicity. And it is all the more obvious that
language is not neutral, not informative. Language is not
made to be believed but to be obeyed. When the schoolteacher
explai ns an operation to the children, or when she teaches
them grammar, she does not, strictJy speaking, give them
information, she communicates orders to them, she transmits
'order-words' to them, necessarily conforming to dominant
meanings. This is why it would be necessary to modify the
schemea of informatics. The schema of informatics begins
from a presumed maximal theoretical information; at t he
other end, it puts noise as interference, anti-information and,
between the two, redundancy, which diminishes theoretical
information but also enables it to overcome noise. On the
contrary, this would be: above, redundancy as mode of ex-
istence and of propagation of orders (the newspapers, the
' news', proceed by redundancy); underneath, the
face-information, as always the minimum required for the
comprehension of orders; and lower still, something which
could be ei ther the shout, or silence, or stuttering, and which
would be like language's line of flight, speaking in one's own
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 23
language as a foreigner, making a minori ty use of language.
One could also say: undo the face, unravel the face. Anyway,
if linguistics, if informatics, play a repressive role today, it is
because they themselves function as binary machines in these
apparatuses of power and constitute a whole formalization of
order rather than a pure science of units of language and of
abstract information contents.
In everything you have written there is the theme of an
image of thought which would impede thinking, which would
impede the exercise of thought. Nevertheless, you are not a
Heideggerian. You love the grass rather than the trees and the
forest. You do not say that we are not yet thinking, and that
there is a future of thought which plunges into the most
immemorial past, and that, between the two, everything
would be ' hidden from view'. Future and past don't have
much meaning, what counts is the present-becoming:
geography and not history, the middle and not the beginning
or the endJ, grass which is in the middle and which grows from
the middle, and not trees which have a top and roots. Always
grass between the paving stones. But it is thought which is
crushed by these paving stones which are called philosophy,
by t hese images which suffocate and jaundice it. ' Images' here
doesn't refer to ideology but to a whole organization which
effectively trains thought to operate accordi ng to the norms of
an established order or power, and moreover, installs in it an
apparatus of power, sets it up as an apparatus of power itself.
The Ratio as tribunal, as uni versal State, as republic of spirits
(the more you are. subjected, the more you are legislators, for
you are only subject ... to pure reason). In Difference et Re-
petition,
10
*) you tried to enumerate these images which offer
autonomous ends to thought, in order to make it serve ends
which can hardly be acknowledged. They can all be
summarized in the order-word: have correct ideas! It is first of
all the image of good nature and good will - good will of the
thinker who seeks the ' truth', good nature of thought which
possesses 'the true' by right. Then, it is the image of a 'com-
/
24 Dialogues
mon sense' - harmony of a ll the facul ties of a thinking being.
T hen, agai n, it is the image of recognition - ' to recognize',
doesn't this mean that something or someone is set up as a
model of the activities of the thinker who makes use of all his
faculties on an object which is supposedly the same. Then
agai n, it is the image of error - as if thought had only to
mistrust external influences capable of making it take the
'false' as true. Finally, it is the image of knowledge - as place
of truth, and truth as sanctioning answers or solutions for
questions and problems which are supposedly 'given'.
The interesting point is just as much the reverse: how can
thought shake off its model, make its grass grow- even locally,
even at the margins, imperceptibly. Thoughts: ( I) which
would not originate in a good nature and a good will, but
which would come from a violence suffered by thought; (2)
which do not operate in a concord of faculties, but which, on
the contrary, would take each faculty to the limit of its dis-
cordance with the others; (3) which would not be closed on
recognition, but which would open to encounters and would
always be defined as a function of an Outside; (4) which
would not have to struggle against error, but would have to
disengage themselves from a more internal and more powerful
enemy, stupidi ty; (5) which would be defined in the
movement of learning and not in the result of knowledge, and
which would not leave it to anyone, to any Power, to ' pose'
questions or to 'set' problems. And even authors about whom
you have writ ten, whether it is Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche or
Proust, or whether it is Foucaul t - you did not treat them as
authors, that is as objects of recognition, you found in them
these acts of thought without image, blind as well as blinding,
these violences, these encounters, these nuptials which make
them creators well before they are authors. It can always be
said that you were trying to pull them towards you. But they
would scarcely let themselves be pulled. You would only meet
those who had not been waiting for you to produce encounters
in themselves, you claimed to extricate from the history of
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 25
philosophy those who had not waited for you in order to
emerge. You only found creators in those in who had not
waited for you in order to stop being authors (neither Spinoza
nor Nietzsche were ' authors': they escape from it, the one by
the power of a geometrical method, the other by aphorisms
which are the opposite of an author's maxims; even Proust
escapes, by the game of the narrator; and Foucault, cf. the
ways he s uggests for escaping the function of the author in
L 'Ordre du Discours
11
). At the same time that an author is
designated , thought is subjected to an image and writing is
made an activity different from life, having its ends in
itself .. . in order better to serve ends against life.
Your work with Felix (writi ng a deux is already a way of
stopping being an author) has not got you out of this problem
but has given it a very different orientation. You set about
opposing the rhizome to trees. And trees are not a metaphor at
all, but an image of thought, a functioning, a whole apparatus
that is planted in thought in order to make it go in a straight
line and produce the famous correct ideas. There are all kinds
of characteristics in the tree: there is a point of origin, seed or
centre; it is a binary machine or principle of dichotomy, with
its perpetually divided and reproduced branchings, its points
of arborescence; it is an axis of rotation which organizes things
in a circle and the circles round the centre; it is a structure, a
'
system of points and positions which fix all of the possible
wit hin a grid, a hierarchical system or transmission of orders,
with a central instance and recapitulative memory; it has a
future and a past, roots and a peak, a whole history, an
evolution, a development; it can be cut up by cuts which are
said to be significant in so far as they follow its arborescences,
its branchings, its concentricities, its moments of develop-
ment. Now, there is no doubt that trees are planted in our
heads: the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, etc. The whole
world demands roots. Power is always arborescent. There are
few disciplines which do not go through schemas of
arborescence: biology, linguistics, informatics (automata or
/
26 Dialogues
centred systems). And yet, nothing goes through there, even
in these disci plines. Each decisive act testifi es to another
thought, in so far as thoughts are things themselves. There are
multiplicities which constantly go beyond binary machines
and do not let themselves be dichotomized. There are centres
everywhere, like multiplicities of black holes which do not let
themselves be agglomerated. There are lines which do not
amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure
- lines of Oight, becomings, without future or past,
memory, which resist the binary machine- woman-becoming
which is neither man nor woman, animal-becoming which is
neither beast nor man. Non-parallel evolutions, which do not
proceed by differentiation, but which leap from one line to
another, between completely heterogeneous beings; cracks,
imperceptible ruptures, which break the lines even if they
resume elsewhere, leaping over significant breaks . . . The
rhizome is all this. Thinking in things, among things- this is
producing a rhizome and not a root, producing the line and
not the point. Producing population in a desert and not
species and genres in a forest. Populating without ever
specifying.
What is the situation today? For a long time li terature and
even the arts have been organized into 'schools'. Schools are of
the arborescent type. And a school is al ready terrible: there is
always a pope, manifestos, representatives, declarations of
avant-gardeism, tribunals, excommunications, impudent
political volte-faces, etc. The worst thing about schools is not
merely the sterilization of disciples (they have richl y deserved
it), it is rather the crushing, the suffocation, of all that
happened before or at the same time - as 'Symbolism'
suffocated the extraordinarily rich poetic movement of the late
nineteenth century, as Surrealism crushed the international
Dadaist movement, etc. Today schools are no longer fee-
payi ng, but operate for the benefit of a still darker organ-
ization: a kind of marketing, where the interest has moved and
no longer relates to books but to newspaper articles,
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 27
broadcasts, debates, colloquia, round tables about a doubtful
book which, at the limit, doesn' t even need to exist. Is this the
death of the book as McLuhan predicted? There is a very
complex phenomenon here: the cinema above all, but also to a
certain extent the newspapers, the radio and the TV, have
themselves been powerful elements which have brought the
author-function into question and have released creative
functions- at least potentially- which no longer pass through
an Author.
But as writing taught itself to detach itself from the
author-function, it has been reconstit uted at the periphery,
regaining credi t on the radio, the TV, in the newspapers, and
even in the cinema (the cinema d'auteur). At the same time as
journalism has increasingly created the events about which it
speaks, the journalist has discovered himself to be an author
and has given reality back to a function which had fallen into
discredit. T he relationships of force between press and book
have changed completely and writers or intellectuals have
passed into the service of j ournalists, or become their own
journalists, journalists of themselves. T hey have become the
servants of interviewers, debaters, and presenters: the
journalization of the writer, clown's tricks that the radios and
TVs make the consenting writers undergo. Andre Scala has
anlysed this new situation very well. Hence the possibility of
marketing which is today replacing the old-fashioned schools.
So that the problem consists in reinventing- not simply for
writing, but also for the cinema, the radio, the TV, and even
for journalism - the creative or productive functions freed of
this always reappearing author-function. For the dis-
advantages of the Author are constituting a poi nt of departure
or of origin, forming a subject of enunciation on which all the
utterances depend, getting recognized and
Identified in an order of dominant meanings or established
powers: ' I in my capacity as ... 'Creative functions are com-
pletely different, nonconformist usages of the rhizome and not
the tree type, which proceed by intersections, crossings of
/
28 Dialogues
lines, points of encounter in the middle: there is no subject,
but instead collecti ve assemblages of enunciation; there are no
specificities but instead populations, music-wntmg-
sciences-audio:visual, with their relays, their echoes, their
working interactions. What a musician does in one place will
be useful to a writer somewhere else, a scientist makes com-
pletely different regimes move, a painter is caused to jump by
a percussion: these are not encounters between domains, for
each domain is already made up of such encounters in itself.
There are only intermezzos, intermezzi, as sources of creation.
This is what a conversation is, and not the talk or the pre-
formed debate of specialists amongst themselves, not even an
interdisciplinarity which would be ordered in a common pro-
j ect. Oh, of course, the old schools and the new marketing do
not exhaust our possibilities; everything that is alive happens
elsewhere and is produced elsewhere. There could be a
charter for intellectuals, writers, artists, in which they would
speak of their refusal to be domesticated by newspapers,
radios, TVs, even if this means forming production groups
and imposing connections between the creative functions and
the dumb functions of those who don't have the means or the
right to speak. Above all it's not a question of speaking for the
unhappy, of speaking in the name of victims, of the tortured
and the oppressed, but of producing a living line, a broken
line. The advantage would be - at least in the intellectual
world, however small it is-of separating those who want to be
'authors', to form schools or engage in marketing, placing
their narcissistic films, their interviews, their broadcasts and
their moods (the shame of today), and those who dream of
something else- they don' t dream, that happens by itself. The
two dangers are the intellectual as master or disciple, or else
the intellectual as executive, middle or senior executive.
What matters on a path, what matters on a line, is always
the middle, not the beginning or the end. We are always in the
middle of a path, in the middle of something. The boring thing
about questions and answers, about interviews, about con-
A Conversation: What is it? Wlzat is it for? 29
versations, is that usually it's a matter of taking stock: the past
and the present, the present and the future. This is why it is
even and always possible to say of an author that his first work
al ready contains the whole, or on the contrary that he is
ceaselessly renewing himself, transforming himself. In every
case it is the theme of the embryo which evolves, sometimes on
the basis of a preformation in the seed, sometimes on the basis
of successive structurations. But the embryo, evolution, are
not good things. Becoming does not happen in that way. In
becoming there is no past nor future- not even present, there
is no history. In becoming it is, rather, a matter of involuting;
it's neither regression nor progression. To become is to be-
come more and more restrained, more and more simple, more
and more deserted and for that very reason populated. This is
what's difficult to explain: to what extent one should involute.
It is obviously the opposite of evolution, but it is also the
opposite of regression, returning to a childhood or to a
primitive world. To involute is to have an increasingly simple,
economical, restrained step. It is also true for clothes: elegance
as the opposite of the overdressed where too much is put on,
where something more is always added which will spoil every-
thing (English elegance against Italian overdressedness). It is
also true of cooking: against evolutive cooking, which always
adds something more, against regressive cooking which re-
turns to primary elements, there is involutive cooking, which
is perhaps that of the anorexic. Why is there such an elegance
in certain anorexics? I t is also true of life, even of the most
animal kind: if the animals invented their forms and their
functions, this was not always by evolving, by developing
themselves, nor by regressing as in the case of prematuration,
but by losing, by abandoning, by reducing, by simplifyi ng,
even if this means creating new elements and new relations of
this simplification.
12
Experimentation is involutive, the
opposite of the overdose. It is also true of writing; to reach this
sobriety, this simplicity which is neither the end nor the
beginning of something. To involute is to be ' between', in the
/
30 Dialogues
middle, adj acent. Beckett's characters are in perpetual in-
volution, always in the middle of a path, already en route. If one
has to hide, if one always has to put on a mask, this is not
because of a taste for the secret which would be a little
personal secret, nor as a precaution - it is because of a secret
of a higher nature, that is, that the path has no beginning or
end, that it is in its nature to keep its beginning and end
hidden, because it cannot do otherwise. If not it would no
longer be a path, it only exists as path in the middle. The
dream would be that you are Felix's mask and Felix is yours.
Then there would really be a path between the two, that
someone else could take in the middle, even if in his turn, etc.
That's it, a rhizome, or weed. Embryos, trees, develop
according to their genetic preformation or their structural
reorganizations. But the weed overflows by virtue of being
restrained. It grows between. It is the path itself. The English
and the Americans, who are the least ' author-like' of writers,
have two particularly sharp directions which connect: that of
the road and of the path, that of the grass and of the rhizome.
Perhaps this is the reason that they hardly have such a thing
as philosophy as a specialized institution and don' t have any
need for it, because they were able in their novels to make
writing an act of thought and life a non-personal power, grass
and path in one another, becoming-bison. Henry Miller:
'Grass only exists between the great non-cultivated spaces. It
fill s in the voids. ll grows between - among the other things. The
flower is beautiful, the cabbage is useful, the poppy makes you
crazy. But the grass is overflowing, it is a lesson in morality.'
13
The walk as act, as politics, as experimentation, as life: ' I
spread myself out like fog BETWEEN the people that I know
the best' says Virginia Woolf in her walk among the taxis.
The middle has nothing to do with an average, it is not a
centrism or a form of moderation. On the contrary, it's a
matter of absolute speed. Whatever grows from the middle is
endowed with such a speed. We must distinguish not relative
and absolute movement, but the relative and absolute speed of
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 31
any movement. The relative is the speed of one movement
considered from the point of view of another. But the absolute
is the speed of movement between the two, in the middle of the
two, which trace's a line of flight. Movement does not go from
one point to another - rather it happens between two levels as
in a difference of potential. A difference of intensity produces a
phenomenon, releases or ejects it, sends it into space. Absolute
speed can measure a rapid movement, but not a very slow
movement or even an immobility, like a movement on the
spot. The problem of an absolute speed of thought: there are
some strange statements by Epicurus on this theme. Isn't this
what Nietzsche does with an aphorism? Thought should be
thrown like a stone by a war-machine. Absolute speed is the
speed of nomads, even when they move about slowly. Nomads
are always in the middle. The steppe always grows from the
middle, it is between the great forests and the great empires.
The steppe, the grass and the nomads are the same thing. The
nomads have neither past nor future, they have only becom-
ings, woman-becoming, animal-becoming, horse-becoming:
their extraordinary animalist art. Nomads have no history,
they only have geography. Nietzsche: 'They come like destiny,
w; thout cause, without reason, without consideration, without
pretext.' Kafka: ' It is impossible to understand how they have
got as far as the capital; however, they are there and each
morning seem to increase their number.' Kleist: 'The
Amazons arrive and the Greeks and the Trojans, the two
elements of States, each believe that they come as allies but
they pass between the two and, along the whole length of their
passage, they overthrow both on the line of flight .. .' You and
Felix, you produce the hypothesis that the nomads invented
the war-machine. Which implies that the States don' t have
one, and that the power of the state was founded on something
else. It was an immensely important task for States to try to
appropriate the war-machine by making it into a military
institution or an army, in order to turn it against the nomads.
But States will always have a lot of difficulty with their armies.
/
32 Dialogues
And the war-machine is not primarily a component of the
State apparatus. T he nomads invented a whole numerical
organization which can be found in armies (dozens, hundreds,
etc.). This original organization implies relationships with
women, plants, animals and metals which are very different
from those which are codified in a State. To make thought a
nomadic power is not necessarily to move, but it is to shake
the model of the state apparatus, the idol or image which
weighs down thought, the monster squa tting on it. To give
thought an absolute speed, a war-machine, a geography and
all these becomings or these paths which criss-cross a steppe.
Epicurus, Spinoza and Nietzsche as nomad thinkers.
This question of speed is important and also very complex.
I t doesn't mean the first in the race: you can be late through
speed. I t doesn' t mean changing either: you can be invariable
and constant through speed. Speed is to be caught in a becom-
ing - which is not a development or an evolution. One must be
like a taxi, queue [ligne d'atlente], line of flight, traffic jam,
bottleneck, green and red lights, slightl y paranoid, brushes
with the police. To be an abstract and broken line, a zigzag
which glides 'between'. The grass and speed. What you mis-
named style just now - charm or style- is speed. Children go
fast because they know how to glide in between. Fanny im-
agi nes the same thing of old age: there is also an old-becoming
which defines successful old ages, that is an ageing-quick
which is opposed to the ordinary impatience of old people, to
their despotism, to their evening-anxiety (cf. the nasty phrase
' life is too short'). Ageing quick, according to Fanny, is not to
age precociously, on the contrary, it would be that patience
which really allows the grasping of all the speeds which pass.
Now, it is exactly the same for writing. Writing ought to
produce speed. This doesn' t mean writing rapidly. Whether
it's Celine, or Paul Morand whom Celine admired (' He has
jazzed up the French language'), or Miller: there are
astonishing productions of speed. And what Nietzsche did
with German - that's what it's like to be a foreigner in one's
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 33
own language. It is in writing which is worked over most
slowly that you reach this absolute speed, which is not an
effect but a product. T he speed of music, even the most slow.
Is it by chance that music only knows lines and not points? It
is not possible to produce a point in music. It's nothing but
becomings without future or past. Music is an anti-memory.
It is full of becomings: animal-becoming, child-becoming,
molecular-becoming. Steve Reich wants everything to be
perceived in act in music, wants the process to be completely
understood: therefore this music is the slowest, but because it
makes us perceive all the differential speeds. A work of art
must at least mark the seconds. It's like the fixed plane: a way
of making us perceive all that there is in the image. Absolute
speed, which makes us perceive everything at the same time,
can be characteristic of slowness or even of immobility. Im-
manence. It is exactl y the opposite of development, where the
transcendent principle which determines and structures it
never appears directly on its own account, in perceptible
relation with a process, with a becoming. When Fred Astaire
dances the waltz, it is not l , 2, 3, it is infinitely more detailed.
The tom-tom is not l , 2. When Blacks dance, they are not
seized by a rhythm demon, they hear and perform all the
notes, all the times, all the tones, all the pitches, all the
intensities, all the intervals. It's never I , 2, or l , 2, 3, it's 7, l 0,
14 or 28 primary times as in Turkish music. We rediscover
this question of speeds and slownesses - how they are made
up, and above all how they proceed to very special indi-
viduations, how they produce individuations without a 'sub-
ject' .
A conversation is not made easy if you refrain from taking
stock and don' t allow yourself recollections. But there's
another difficulty. You and Felix (Felix is more rapid than
you), you constantl y attack dualisms. You say that binary
machines are apparat uses of power to break up becomings:
you are man or woman, white or black, thinker or ' liver',
bourgeois or proletarian? But what are you doing if not pro-
/
34 Dialogues
posing other dualisms? Acts of thought without image against
the image of thought; rhizome or grass against the trees; the
war-machine against the state apparatus; complex
multiplicities agai nst uni fi cations and totalizarions, the force
of forgetting against memory; geography against history; the
line against the point, etc. Perhaps it's necessary to say that
language is profoundl y wrought by dualisms and dichotomies,
divisions by 2, binary calculations: masculine-feminine,
singular- plural, nominal syntagm-verbal syntagm.
Linguistics onl y finds in language what is already there: the
arborescent system of hierarchy and command. The I, the
YOU, the HE, is very much a part of language. We must
speak like everyone else, we must pass through dualisms, 1- 2,
or even 1- 2- 3. It must not be said that language deforms a
reality which is pre-existing or of another nature. Language is
first, it has invented the dualism. But the cult of language, the
setting-up of language, li nguistics itself, is worse than the old
ontology from which it has taken over. We must pass through
[passer par] dualisms because they are in language, it's not a
question of getting rid of them, but we must fight agai nst
language, invent stammering, not in order to get back to a
prelinguistic pseudo-reality, but to trace a vocal or written
line which will make language Oow between these dualisms,
and which will define a minority usage of language, an in-
herent variation as Labov says.
In the second place, it is probable that a multiplicity is not
defined by t he number of its terms. We can always add a 3rd
to 2, a 4th to 3, etc., we do not escape dualism in this way,
since the elements of any set whatever can be related to a
succession of choices which are t hemselves binary. It is not the
elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What de-
fines it is the AND, as something which has its place between
the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND
- stammering. And even if there are only two terms, t here is an
AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other,
nor t he one which becomes t he other, but which constitutes
A Conversation: What is it? What is it for? 35
t he multiplicity. This is why it is always possible to undo
dualisms from the inside, by traci ng the line of flight which
passes between t he two terms or the two sets, the narrow
stream which belongs neit her to the one nor to the other, but
draws both into a non-parallel evolution, into a
heterochronous becoming. At least this does not belong to the
dialectic. Thus we could proceed like this: each chapter would
remain divided in two, there would no longer be any reason to
sign each part, since it is between t he two anonymous parts
that the conversation would take place, and the AND Felix,
AND Fanny, AND you, AND all those of whom we speak,
AND me, would appear as so many distorted images in
running water.
C.P.
/
2
On the Superiority of
Anglo-American Literature
I
To leave, to escape, is to trace a line. The highest aim of
literature, according to Lawrence, is 'To leave, to leave, to
escape ... to cross the horizon, enter into another life ... It is
thus that Melville finds himself in the middle of the Pacific.
He has really crossed the line of the horizon.' The line of flight
is a deterritorialization. The French do not understand this
very well. Obviously, they flee like everyone else, but they
think that fleeing means making an exit from the world,
mysticism or art, or else that it is something rather sloppy
because we avoid our commitments and responsibilities. But
to flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a
flight. It is the opposite of the imaginary. It is also to put to
flight - not necessarily others, but to put something to flight,
to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube. George jackson
wrote from prison: ' It may be that I am fleeing, but
throughout my flight, I am searching for a weapon.' And
Lawrence again: ' I tell you, old weapons go rotten: make some
new ones and shoot accurqtely.' To fly is to trace a line, lines,
a whole cartography. One only discovers worlds through a
long, broken flight. Anglo-American literature constantl y
shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of
flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy,
Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe,
Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them everything is
departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship
with the outside. They create a new Earth; but perhaps the
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 37
movement of the earth is deterritorialization itself. American
literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight
rowards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the
\\'est, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push
back, to go beyond.
1
The becoming is geographical. There is
no equivalent in France. The French are too human too
)
historical, too concerned with the future and the past. They
spend their time in in-depth analysis. They do not know how
to become, they think in terms of historical past and future.
Even with the revolution, they think about a ' future of the
revolution' rather than a revolutionary-becoming. They do
not know how to trace lines, to follow a channel. They do not
know how to pierce or plane down the wall. They are too fond
of roots, trees, the survey, the points of arborescence, the
properties. Look at structuralism: it is a system of points and
positions, which operates by cuts which are supposedly
significant instead of proceeding by thrusts and crackings. It
warps the lines of flight instead of following them and tracing
them and extending them in a social field.
Is it in Michelet, the fine 8xtract in which the kings of
France are contrasted with the kings of England: the former
with their politics of land, of inheritance, of marriages, of
lawsuits, of ruses and cheating, the latter with their movement
of deterritorialization, their wanderings and renunciations
their betrayals passing by at breakneck speed? They unleash
the flood of capitalism, but the French invent the bourgeois
apparatus of power capable of blocking them, of calling them
to account.
To flee is not exactly to travel, or even to move. First
because there are travels in the style of the French - too
historical, cultural and organized - where they are content to
transport their own 'egos'. Secondly, because flights can
happen on the spot, in motionless travel. Toynbee shows that
nomads in the strict, geographical sense are neither migrants
nor travellers, but, on the contrary, those who do not move,
those who cling on to the steppe, who are immobile with big
I
38 Dialogues
strides, following a line of flight on the spot, the greatest
inventors of new weapons.
2
But history has never begun to
understand nomads, who have neither past nor future. Maps
are maps of intensities, geography is no less mental and cor-
poreal than physical in movement. When Lawrence takes up
cudgels agai nst Melville, he criticizes him for havi ng taken the
voyage too seriously. The voyage turns out to be a return to
the savage, but such a return is a regression. There is always a
way of reterritoriali zing oneself in the voyage: it is always
one's father or mother (or worse) that one finds again on the
voyage. 'Going back to the savages made Melville sicker than
anything . .. And once he has escaped, immediately he begins
to sigh and pine for the "Paradise", Home and Mother being
at the other end of a whaling voyage.'
3
Fitzgerald puts it even
better: ' This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived
had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is
no parallel to a jail-break when one is probably headed for a
new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous
"escape" or "run away from it all" is an excursion into a
even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for
those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is
somethi ng you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable
because it makes the past cease to exist.'
4
But even when a distinction is drawn between the fl ight and
the voyage, the flight still remains an ambiguous operation.
What is it which tells us that, on a line of flight, we will not
rediscover everything we were fleeing? In fl eeing the eternal
mother-father, will we not rediscover all the Oedipal
structures on the line of flight? In fleeing fascism, we redis-
cover fascist coagulations on the line of flight. In fleeing
everything, how can we avoid reconstituting both our country
of origin and our formations of power, our intoxicants, our
psychoanalyses and our mummies and daddies? How can one
avoid the line of flight's becoming identical with a pure and
simple movement of self-destruction; Fitzgerald's alcoholism,
Lawrence's disillusion, Virginia Wooirs suicide, Kerouac's
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 39
sad end? English and American literature is thoroughly im-
bued with a sombre process of demolition, which carries off
the writer. A happy death? But it is this that can onl y be
understood on the line, at the same time as it is being traced:
the dangers which are courted, the patience and precautions
which must go into avoiding them, the corrections which must
constantly be made to extract the line from the quicksands
and the black holes. Prediction is not possible. A true break
may be extended in time, it is something different from an
over-significant cut, it must constantly be protected not
merely against its false imitations, but also against itself, and
against the reterritorializations which lie in wait for it. This is
why it jumps from one writer to another like something which
must be begun again. The English and the Americans do not
have the same way of beginning again as the French. French
beginning again is the tabula rasa, the search for a primary
certainty as a point of origin, always the point of anchor. The
other way of beginning again, on the other hand, is to take up
the interrupted line, to join a segment to the broken line, to
make it pass between two rocks in a narrow gorge, or over the
top of the void, where it had stopped. It is never the beginning
or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are
points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is
always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle.
Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable posi-
tion. One begins again through the middle. The French think
in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of
arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the
pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass
grow in the middle of things, but it grows itsejf through the
middle. This is the English or American problem. Grass has
its line of flight, and does not take root. We have grass in the
head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a
' particular nervous of grass.
5
Take as an example the case of T homas Hardy: his charac-
ters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive
I
40 Dialogues
sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc of
variable sensations. There is a strange respect for the indi-
vidual, an extraordinary respect: not because he would seize
upon himself as a person and be recognized as a person, in the
French way, but on the contrary because he saw himself and
saw others as so many ' unique chances'- the unique chance
from which one combination or another had been drawn.
Individuation without a subject. And these packets of
sensations in the raw, these collections or combinations, run
along the lines of chance, or mischance, where their en-
counters take place- if need be, their bad encounters which
lead to death, to murder. Hardy invokes a sort of Greek
destiny for this empiricist experimental world. Individuals,
packets of sensations, run over the heath like a line of flight or
a line of deterritorialization of the earth.
A flight is a sort of delirium.
6
To be delirious [dilirer] is
exactly to go off the rails (as in diconner- to say absurd things,
I
etc.). There is something demonaical or demonic in a line of
flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have
fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and
codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys'.
What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one
interval to another. ' Which demon has leapt the longest leap?'
asks Oedipus. There is always betrayal in a line of flight. Not
trickery like that of an orderly man ordering his future, but
betrayal like that of a simple man who no longer has any past
or future. We betray the flxed powers which try to hold us
back, the established powers of the earth. The movement of
betrayal has been deflned as a double turning-away: man
turns his face away from God, who also turns his face away
from man. It is in this double turning-away, in the divergence
of faces, that the line of flight- that is, the deterritorialization
of man - is traced. Betrayal is like theft, it is always double.
Oedipus at Colonnus, with his long wanderings, has been
taken as the prime example of a double turning-away. But
Oedipus is the only Semitic tragedy of the Greeks. God who
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 41
turns away from man who turns away from God is the
primary theme of the Old Testament. It is the story of Cain,
Cain's line of flight. It is the story of J onah: the prophet is
recognizable by the fact that he takes the opposite path to that
which is ordered by God and thereby realizes God's com-
mandment better than if he had obeyed. A traitor, he has
taken misfortune upon himself. The Old Testament is con-
stantly criss-crossed by these lines of flight, the line of separ-
ation between the earth and the waters. ' Let the elements stop
kissing, and turn their backs on one another. Let the merman
turn away from his human wife and children . . . Cross the
seas, cross the seas, urges the heart. Leave love and home.'
7
The 'great discoveries', the great expeditions, do not merely
involve uncertainty as to what will be discovered, the con-
quest of the unknown, but the invention of a line of flight, and
the power of treason: to be the only traitor, and traitor to all-
Aguirre, Wrath of God. Christopher Columbus, as Jacques
Besse describes him in an extraordinary tale, including the
woman-becoming of Columbus.
8
The cr eative theft of the
traitor, .as against the plagiarisms of the trickster.
The Old Testament is not an epic, or a tragedy, but the first
novel, and it is as such that the English understand it, as the
foundation of the novel. The traitor is the essential character
of the novel, the hero. A traitor to the world of dominant
significations, and to the established order. This is quite
different from the trickster: for the trickster claims to take
possession of flxed properties, or to conquer a territory, or
even to introduce a new order. The trickster has plenty of
future, but no becoming whatsoever. The priest, the
soothsayer, is a trickster, but the experimenter is a traitor.
The statesman or the courtier is a trickster, but the man of
war (not a marshal or a general ) is a traitor. The French novel
gives us many tricksters, and our novelists are often tricksters
themselves. They have no special relationship with the Old
Testament. Shakespeare put on the stage many trickster-
kings, who came to the throne by trickery, and who in the last
/
42 Dialogues
analysis turn out to be good kings. But when he encounters
Richard I I I he rises to the height of the most novelistic of
tragedies. For Richard III does not simply want power, he
wants treason. He does not want the conquest of the state, but
the assemblage of a war-machine: how can he be the only
traitor, and betray all simultaneously? The dialogue wit h
Lady Anne, which critics have judged to be ' improbable and
exaggerated', shows the two faces which are turning away,
and Anne, already consenting and fascinated, has a pre-
sentiment of the tortuous line which Richard is tracing. And
nothing reveals treason better than the choice of object. Not
because it is a choice of object- a poor notion - but because it
is a becoming, it is the demonic element par excellence. In his
choice of Anne there is a woman-becomi ng in Richard Ill. Of
what is Captain Ahab in Melville guilty? Of having chosen
Moby Dick, the white whale, instead of obeying the law of the
group of fi shermen, accordi ng to which all whales arc fit to,
hunt. In that lies Ahab's demonic element, his treason, his
relationship with Leviathan - this choice of object which
engages him in a whale-becoming himself. The same theme
appears in Kleist's Penthesilea: the sin of Penthesilea, to have
chosen Achilles while the law of the Amazons ordains that
they should not choose the enemy: Penthesilea's demonic
clement leads her into a dog-becoming. (Kleist appalled the
Germans, who did not recognize him as one of them: in his
long excursions on horseback, Kleist was one of the authors
who, despite the German order, knew how to trace a dazzling
li ne of flight across forests and states. Likewise Lenz or
Buchner, all the anti-Goethes. ) We must define a special
function, which is identical neither with health nor illness: the
function of the Anomalous. T he Anomalous is always at the
frontier, on the border of a band or a mul tiplicity; it is part <?f
the latter, but is already making it pass into another
multiplicity, it makes it become, it traces a line-between. This
is also the 'outsider' :
9
" Moby Dick, or the Thing or Entity of
Lovecraft, terror.
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 43
It is possible that writing has an intrinsic relationship with
Jines of fl ight. To write is to trace li nes of fl ight which are not
imaginary, and which one is indeed forced to follow, because
in reality writing involves us there, draws us in there. To write
is to become, but has nothing to do with becoming a writer.
That is to become something else. A writer by profession can
judge hi mself in the light of his past or his fut ure, in the light
ofhis persona l future, or of posteri ty (' I will be understood in
two years, in a hundred years,' etc.). The becomings con-
tained in writing when it is not wedded to established
order-words, but itself traces lines of flight are quite different.
You might say that writi ng by itself, when it is not official,
necessarily comes into contact with ' minori ties' who do not
necessarily wri te on their own account, about whom no one
writes either, in the sense that they would be taken as obj ect,
but, on the contrary, in which one is caught up willy-nilly,
from the fact that one is wri ting. A minori ty never exists
ready-made, it is only formed on lines of fl ight, which are also
its way of advancing and attacking. There is a
woman-becoming in writing. Madame Bovary, c'est moi is the
sentence of a hysterical trickster. Even women do not always
succeed when they force themselves to write like women, as a
function of a future of woman. Woman is not necessarily the
writer, but the mi nority-becomi ng of her writi ng, whether it
be man or woman. Virginia Woolf forbade herself 'to speak
like a woman': she harnessed the woman-becoming of writing
all the more for this. Lawrence and Mi ller are considered to be
great sexists: wri ting, however, drew them into an irresisti ble
woman-becoming. It is only through this becoming, where
women have to make as much effort as men, that England has
produced so many women novelists. T here are Negro-
becomings in writi ng, lndian-bccomings which do not consist
in speaki ng American I ndian or ' pidgin French'. There are
animal-becomings in writing which do not consist in imitating
the ani mal, in ' playing' the animal, any more than Mozart's
music imitates birds, although it is imbued with a
/
44 Dialogues
bird-becoming. Captain Ahab has a whale-becoming which is
not one of imita tion. Lawrence has the tortoise-becoming, in
his admirable poems. There are animal-becomings in
li terature which do not consist in talking of one's dog or cat. It
is rather an encounter between two reigns, a short-circuit, the
picking-up of a code where each is deterritorialized. In writing
one always gives wri ti ng to those who do not have it, but the
latter give writing a becoming without which it would not
exist, without which it would be pure redundancy in the
service of the powers that be. That the writer is minoritarian
does not mean that there are fewer people who write than
read; this would no longer even be true today: it means that
wri ting always encounters a minority which does not write,
and it does not undertake to write for this minority, in its place
or at its bidding, but there is an encounter in which each
pushes the other, draws it on to its line of flight in a combined
deterri torialization. Writing aJways combines with something
else, which is its own becoming. There is no assemblage which
functions on a single flux. This is not a matter of imitation, but
of conjunction. The writer is imbued to the core with a non-
writer-becoming. Hofmannsthal (who then adopts an English
pseudonym) can no longer write when he sees the agony of a
mob of rats, because he senses that it is in him that the
ani mal's soul bares its teeth. A fine English film, Willard,
showed the irresistible rat-becoming of the hero, who cl utched
at humanity at every chance but nevertheless found himself
drawn into this fatal coupling. That there are so many writers'
silences and suicides must be explained by these nuptials
against nature, these collaborations against nature. What
other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one's own
reign, traitor to one's sex, to one's class, to one's majori ty?
And to be traitor to writing.
Many people dream of being traitors. They believe in it,
they believe that they are. But they are just petty tricksters.
Take the pathetic case of Maurice Sachs, in French literature.
What trickster has not said to himself: ' Oh, at last I am a real
On the Superiority of A11glo-American Literature 45
traitor.' But what traitor does not say to himself at the day's
end: 'After aU, I was nothing but a trickster.' For it is difficult
to be a traitor; it is to create. One has to lose one's identity,
one's face, in it. One has to disappear, to become unknown.
The a im, the finali ty of writing? Still way beyond a woman-
becoming, a Negro-becoming, an animal-becoming, etc.,
beyond a minori ty-becoming, there is the final enterprise of
the becoming-imperceptible. Oh no, a writer cannot wish to
be ' known', recognized. The imperceptible, common charac-
teristic of the greatest speed and the greatest slowness.
Writing has no other end than to lose one's face, to jump over
or pierce through the wall, to plane down the wall very
patiently. This is what Fitzgerald called a true break: the line
of flight, not the voyage into the South Seas, the acquisition of
a clandestinity (even if one has to become animal, to become
Negro or woman). To be unknown at last, as are very few
people, is to betray. It is very difficult not to be known at aU,
even by one's landlady or in one's neighbourhood, the
nameless singer, the ritornello. At the end of e ~ ~ d e r is the Night,
the hero literall y dissipates himself geographically. That text
of Fitzgerald's which is so fine, The Crack-Up, says: ' I felt like
the men whom I used to see in the suburban trains of Great
Neck fifteen years before ... ' T here is a whole social system
which might be called the white wall/ black hole system. We
are always pinned agai nst the wall of dominant significations,
we are always sunk in the hole of our subj ectivity, the black
hole of our Ego which is more dear to us than anything. A wall
on which are inscribed all the objective determinations which
fix us, put us into a grille, identify us and make us recognized,
a hole where we deposit - together with our consciousness -
our feelings, our passions, our little secrets which are all too
well known, our desire to make them known. Even if the face
is a product of this system, it is a social production: a broad
face wi th white cheeks, with the black hole of the eyes. Our
societies need to produce the face. Christ invented the face.
Miller's problem (like Lawrence's): how to unmake the face,
/
46 Dialogues
by liberating in ourselves the questing heads which trace the
lines of becoming? How to get past the wall while avoiding
bouncing back on it, behind, or being crushed? How to get out
of the black hole instead of whirling round in its depths, which
particles to get out of the black hole? How to shatter even our
love in order to become finally capable of loving? How to
become imperceptible?
I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my
arms, but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I
see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region
unexplored, a world of futurity, and here there is no logic
whatever . . . this selfless eye neither reveals nor
illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a
ceaseless, uninformed voyager ... I have broken t he wall
created by birth and the line of voyage is round and un-
broken ... My whole body must become a constant beam
of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity ... Therefore
I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Before I shall become
quite man again, I shall probably exist as a park ...
10
There we no longer have any secrets, we no longer have
anythi ng to hide. It is we who have become a secret, it is we
who are hidden, even though we do all openly, in broad
daylight. T his is the opposite of the romanticism of t he
'damned'. II We have painted ourselves in the colours of the
world. Lawrence condemned the craze for ' the dirty little
secret', which he saw as running through all French li terature.
T he characters and the authors always have a little secret, on
which the craze for interpretation feeds. Something must
always remind us of something else, make us think of some-
thing else. We remember Oedipus' dirty little secret, not the
Oedipus of Colonnus, on his line of fl ight, who has become
imperceptible, identical to the great living secret. The great
secret is when you no longer have anything to hide, and thus
when no one can grasp you. A secret everywhere, no more to
be said. Since the 'signifier' has been invented, things have not
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 47
fallen into place. Instead of language being interpreted by us,
it has set about interpreting us, and interpreting itself.
Signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of t he earth,
the pair of despot and priest. The signifier is always the little
secret which has never stopped hanging around mummy and
daddy. We blackmail ourselves, we make ourselves out to be
mysterious, discreet, we move with the air of saying 'See how I
am weighed down by a secret.' The thorn in the flesh. The
little secret is generally reducible to a sad narcissisti c and
pious masturbation: the phantasm! 'Transgression', a concept
too good for seminarists under the law of a Pope or a priest,
the tricksters. Georges Bataille is a very French author . He
made the little secret the essence of literature, with a mother
within, a priest beneath, an eye above. It is impossible to
overemphasize the harm t hat t he phantasm has done to
writing (it has even invaded t he cinema) in sustaining the
signifier, and the interpretation of one by the other, of one
wit h the other. 'The world of phantasms is a world of the
past', a t heatre of resentment and guilt. You see many people
today one after another proclaiming ' Long live castration, for
it is t he home, the Origi n and the End of desire!' What is in
the middle is forgotten. New races of priests are always being
invented for the dirty little secret, whkh has no other obj ect
than to get itself recognized, to put us back into a very black
hole, to bounce us ofT the very whi te wall.
Your secret can always be seen on your face and in your
eyes. Lose your face. Become capable of loving wit hout re-
membering, without phantasm and without interpretation,
without taking stock. Let there j ust be fluxes, which
sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes com-
bine or diverge. A man and a woman are fluxes. All the
becomings which there are in making love, all the sexes, the n
sexes in a single one, or in two, which have nothing to do with
castration. On lines of flight there can no longer be but one
thing, life-experimentation. One never knows in advance,
since one no longer has either future or past. 'See me as I am':
/
\
48 Dialogues
all that stuff is over. There is no longer a phantasm, but only
programmes of life, always modified in the process of coming
into being, betrayed in the process of being hollowed out, like
banks which are disposed or canals which are arranged in
order that a flux may flow. There are now onl y voyages of
exploration in which one always finds in the West that which
one had thought to be in the East, organs reversed. Every line
in which someone gets carried away is a line of rest raint in
comparison with the laborious, precise, controlled trash of
French writers. No longer is there the infinite account of
interpretations which are always slightly disgusting, but fi n-
ished processes of experimentation, protocols of experience.
Kleist and Kafka spent their time making programmes for life.
Programmes are not manifestos - still less are they
phantasms, hut means of providing reference points for an experiment
which exceeds our capacities to foresee (likewise, what is called
programme music). The strength ofCasta neda's books, in his
programmed experiment with drugs, is that each time the
interpretations are dismantled and the famous signifier is
eliminated. No, the dog I saw and ran along with under the
effect of the drug was not my whore of a mother ... This is a
procedure of animal-becoming which does not try to say any-
thing other than what he becomes, and makes me become
with him. Other becomings will li nk up here, molecular-
becomings in which the air, sound, water are grasped in their
particles at the same time as their flux combines with mine. A
whole world of micro-perceptions which lead us to the im-
perceptible. Experiment, never interpret. Make programmes,
never make phantasms. Henry J ames, who is one of those to
have penetrated most deeply the woman-becoming of writing,
invents a post-office girl , a heroine caught in a telegraphic
flux, which at the start she dominates, thanks to her ' prodi-
gious art of interpretation' (evaluating the senders, the
anonymous or coded telegrams). But from fragment to
fragment is constructed a living experiment in which interpre-
tation begins to crumble, in which there is no longer
On the Superioriry of Anglo-American Literature 49
perception or knowledge, sec_ret or divi nation. 'She had ~ n e
up knowing so much about 1t that she could no longer mter-
pret, there w e ~ e no longer obscuri ties which made her see
clearl y . . . all that was lefl was a garish light.' English or
American literature is a process of experimentation. They
have killed interpretation.
T he great and only error li. es in thinking that a line of
flight consists in fleeing from life; the flight into the imaginary,
or into art. On the contrary, to fl ee is to produce the real, to
create life, to find a weapon. Generally it is in the same false
movement that life is reduced to something personal and that
the work is supposed to find its end in itself, whether as total
work, or work in the process of being created, which always
refers back to a writing of wri ting. T his is why French
literature abounds in manifestos, in ideologies, in theories of
writing, a t the same time as in personal conflicts, in perfecting
of perfectings, in neurotic toadying, in narcissistic tribunals.
Writers have their own filthy hovel in life, at the same time as
having their land, their motherland, which is all the more
spiritual in the work to be created. They are happy to stink
personally, since what they write will be aJI the more sublime
and significant. French literature if often the most shameless
eulogy of neurosis. The work will be all the more significant
for referring to the sly wink and life's little secret, and vice
versa. You should hear qualified critics talking of Kleist's
failures, Lawrence's impotence, Kafka's childishness,
Carroll's little girls. It is unworthy. It is always done with the
best intentions: the work will appear all the greater the more
pitiful the life is made to seem. There is thus no risk of seeing
the power of life which runs through a work. All has been
crushed in advance. It is the same resentment, the same taste
for castration, which animates the great Signifier as proposed
finality of the work, and the little imagi nary Signified, the
phantasm as suggested expedient of life. Lawrence criticized
French literature for being incurably intellectual, ideological
and idealist, essentiall y critical, critical of life rather than
/
50 Dialogues
creati ve of life. French na tionalism in letters: a terri ble mania
for j udging and being judged runs through that litera ture:
there are too many hysterics among these writers and their
characters. Hating, wanting to be loved, but a huge incapacity
to love and admire. In reali ty writing does not have its end in itself,
precisely because life is not something personal. Or rather, the aim of
wri ting is to carry life to the sta te of a non-personal power. In
doing this it renounces claim to any territory, any end which
would reside in itself. Why-does one write? Because it is not a
case of writing. It may be that the writer has delicate health, a
weak constitution. He is none the less the opposite of the
neurotic: a sort of great Alive (in the manner of Spinoza,
Nietzsche or Lawrence) in so far as he is only too weak for the
life which runs in him or for the affects which pass in him. To
write has no other function: to be a flux which combines with
other fluxes - all the minority-becomings of the world. A flux
is something intensive, instantaneous and mutant - between a
creation and a des truction. It is only when a flux is de-
terri tori ali zed that it succeeds in making its conjunction with
other fluxes, which deterritorialize it in their turn, and vice
versa. In an animal-becoming a man and an animal combine,
neither of which resembles the other, neither of which imitates
the other, each deterritorializing the other, pushing the line
further. A system of relay and mutations through the middle.
The line of flight is creative of these becomings. Lines of flight
have no territory. Wri ting carries out the conjunction, the
transmutation of fluxes, through which life escapes from the
resentment of persons, societies and reigns. Kerouac's phrases
are as sober as a Japanese drawing, a pure line traced by an
unsupported hand, which passes across ages and reigns. It
would take a true alcoholic to attain that degree of sobriety.
Or the heath-phrase, the heath-line of Thomas Hardy: it is
not that the heath is the subject or the content of the novel,
but that a flux of modern writing combines with a flux of
immemorial heath. A heath-becoming; or else Miller 's
grass-becoming, wha t he calls his China-becoming. Virginia
On tlze Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 51
Woolf and her gift of pasing from one reign to another, from
one element to another; did it need Vi rginia Woolrs anorexia?
One onl y writes through love, a ll writing is a love-letter: the
literature-Real. One should onl y die through love, and not a
tragic death . One should onl y write through this death, or
stop wri ting through this love, or continue to write, both at
once. We know no book of love more important, more in-
sinuating than Kerouac's The Underground Ones. He does not
ask ' What is wri ting?', because he has all its necessity, the
impossibility of another choice which indeed makes writing,
on the condition tha t for him writing is already another be-
coming, or comes from another becoming. Writing, the means
to a more than personal life, instead of life being a poor secret
for a writing which has no end other than itsel f. Oh, the
poverty of the imaginary and the symbolic, the real always
being put off until tomorrow.
II
The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept
or the signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage
which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their
cause a subject which would act as a subj ect of enunciation,
any more t han they are related to subj ects as subjects of
utterance. T he utterance is the product of an assemblage -
which is always collective, which brings into play withi n us
and outside us populations, multiplicities, terri tories, becom-
ings, affects, events. The proper name docs not designate a
subject, but something which happens, at least between two
terms which are not subjects, but agents, elements. Proper
names are not names of persons, but of peoples and tribes,
fl ora and fauna, military opera tions or typhoons, coll ectives,
limited companies and production studios. The author is a
subject of enunciation but the wri ter - who is not an author -
is not. The writer invents assemblages starting from
/
52 Dialogues
assemblages which have invented him, he makes one
multiplicity pass into another. The difficult part is making all the
elements of a non-homogeneous set converge, making them
function together. Structures are linked to conditions of
homogeneity, but assemblages are not. The assemblage is co-
functioning, it is 'sympathy', symbiosis. With deepest sympathy.
Sympathy is not a vague feeling of respect or of spirituaJ
participation: on the contrary, it is the exertion or the
penetration of bodies, hatred or love, for hatred is also a com-
pound, it is a body, it is no good except when it is compounded
with what it hates. Sympathy is bodies who love or hate each
other, each time with populations in play, in these bodies or on
these bodies. Bodies may be physical, biological, psychic, social,
verbal: they are always bodies or corpora. The author, as subject
of enunciation, is first of aU a spirit: sometimes he identifies with
his characters or makes us identifY with them, or with the idea
which they represent; sometimes, on the other hand, he intro-
duces a distance which aJlows him and us to observe to criticize
' '
to prolong. But this is no good. The author creates a world, but
there is no world which awaits us to be created. Neither
identification nor distance, neither proximity nor remoteness,
for, in aJl these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of ...
One must, on the contrary, speak with, write with. With the
world, with a part of the world, with people. Not a talk at all, but
a conspiracy, a collision oflove or hatred. There is no judgement
in sympathy, but agreements of convenience between bodies of
all kinds. ' All the subtle sympathies of the soul without number,
from the bitterest hatred to the most passionate love. '
12
This is
assembling, being in the middle, on the line of encounter be- .
tween an internal world and the external world. Being in the
middle: 'The most important thing ... is to make ... (himself]
perfectl y useless, to be absorbed in the common stream, to
become a fish again and not a freak of nature. The only benefit, I
refl ected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove
the differences which separated me from my fellow man.' 13
It must be said that it is the world itself which lays the two
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 53
traps of distance and identification for us. There are many
neurotics and lunatics in the world who do not let go of us
until they have managed to reduce us to us
thei r poison, hysterics, narcissists, their contagiOn IS
There are many doctors and scholars who offer us a samtJzed
scientific observation, who are also true lunatics, paranoiacs.
One must resist both of the traps, the one which offers us the
mirror of contamination and identifications, and the one
which points out to us the observation of the understanding.
We can only assemble among assemblages. We only have
sympathy to struggle and to write, .to say. B.ut
sympathy is something to be reckoned 1t _J S a bodtl.y
struggle, hating what threatens and infects hfe, 1t
proliferates (no posterity or lineage, but a prohferauon ... ).
No, says Lawrence, you are not the little Eskimo goi ng by,
yellow and greasy, you do not need to mistake yourself for
him. But you may perhaps put his shoes,. you
something to assemble with him, an wh1ch
does not consist in playing the Esk1mo, m urutaung or
identifying yourself with him or taking the Eskimo your-
self. but in assembling something between you and htm, for
can only become Eskimo if the himself
something else. The same goes for lunaucs, drug add1cts,
alcoholics. I hear the objection: with your puny sympathy you
make use of lunatics, you sing the praises of madness, then
you drop them, you onl y go so far ... This is w_e are
trying to extract from love all possession, all 1dentificauon to
become capable of loving. We are trying to extract
madness the life which it contains, while hating the lunaucs
who constantl y kill life, turn it against itself. We are try.ing to
extract from alcohol the life which it contains, wthout
drinking: the great scene of drunkenness on pure water in
Henry Miller. Becoming is loving without alcohol, and
madness, becoming-sober for a life which is ri cher and
This is sympathy, assembling. Making one's
of making a career, being neither simulator of 1denuficauons
I
54 Dialogues
nor the frigid doctor of distances. You will get into your bed as
you made it, no one will_ come to tuck you in. Too many
people to be m by a huge identifyi ng mother, or
by the soc1al med1cal officer of distances. Yes lunatics
neurotics, alcoholics and drug the
fect1ous on_es, let get out of it as best they can: our very
sympathy IS that 1t should be none of our business. Each one
of us has to make his own way. But being capable of it is
sometimes difficult.
A of the longer a paragraph, the
1t IS SUited to bemg read very quickly. And the re-
ought to function as accelerations. Certain examples
w11J recur constantly: WASP and ORCHID, or HORSE and
One might put forward many others, but re-
turnang to the same example should lead to acceleration even
at risk of wearying the reader. A ritornello? All mus,ic, all
wnung takes that course. It is the conversation itself which
will be a ritornello.
On Empiricism
Why write, why have written about empiricism and about
Hume in _rarticular? is like 'the English
novel: It _rs a of ph1losoph1zrng as a novelist, of being a
rn ph1losophy. Empiricism is often defined as a
doct_nne according to which the intelligible 'comes' from the
sens1ble, everythi ng in the understanding comes from the
senses. But that. is the of the history of phi losophy:
they have the g1ft o_f all life in seeking and in positing
an first pnnc1ple. Whenever one believes in a great
first. one can no longer produce anything but huge
stenl_e d uahsms. Philosophers willingly surrender themselves
to and their discussions on what should be the first
pnnc1plc (Be1ng, the Ego, the Sensible? ... ). But it is not
worth invoking the concrete ri chness of the sensible if it
IS to _make it into an abstract principle. In fact the first
pnnc1ple IS always a mask, a simple image. That docs not
On the of Anglo-American Literature 55
exist, things do not start to move and come alive until the level
of the second, third, fourth principle, and these arc no longer
even principles. Things do not begin to live except in the
middle. In this respect what is it that the empiricists found,
not in their heads, but in the world, which is like a vital
discovery, a certainty of life which, if one reall y adheres to it,
changes one's way of life? It is not the question ' Does the
intelligible come from the sensible?' but a quite different
question, that of relations. Relations are external to their terms.
'Peter is smaller than Paul', 'The glass is on the table': rela-
tion is neither internal to one of the terms which would
consequently be subject, nor to two together. Moreover, a
relation may change wit hout the terms changing. One may
object that t he glass is perhaps altered when it is moved off the
table, but that is not true. The ideas of the glass and the table,
which are the true terms of the relations, are not altered.
Relations are in the middle, and exist as such. This exteriority
of relations is not a principle, it is a vital protest against
principles. Indeed if one sees in it something which runs
through life, but which is repugnant to thought, then thought
must be forced to think it, one must make relations the
hallucination point of thought, an experimentation which
does violence to thought. Empiricists are not theoreticians,
they are experimenters: they never interpret, they have no
principles. If one takes this exteriority of relations as a con-
ducting wire or as a line, one sees a very strange world unfold,
fragment by fragment: a Harlequin's j acket or patchwork,
made up of solid parts and voids, blocs and ruptures,
attractions and divisions, nuances and bluntnesses, con-
junctions and separations, alternations and interweavings,
additions which never reach a total and subtractions whose
remainder is never fixed. One can see clearly how the pseudo-
first principle of empiricism derives from this, but as a
negative limit, always being pushed back, a mask put on at
the start: in effect if relations are external and irreducible to
their terms, then the difference cannot be between the sensible
I
56 Dialogues
and th.e intelligi.ble, between experience and thought, between
sensations and tdeas, but only between two sorts of ideas or
two sorts of experiences, tha t of terms and that of
The famous association of ideas is certainl y not reducible to
the which the history of philosophy has retained
from tt. In Hume there are ideas, and then the relations
ideas, relations whjch may vary wi thout the
var:mg, and then the circumstances, actions and pas-
stons whtch make these relations vary. A complete ' Hume-
assemblage', whi.ch takes on the most varied figures. In order
to become the owner of an abandoned city, does one have to
its gate one's hand, or is it enough to throw one's
Javelm from a dtstance? Why in some cases does what is above
prevail over what is underneath and in other cases the reverse
{the ground prevails over the surface, but painti ng over the
canvas, etc.)? Try your own experiments: each time there is an
assemblage of ideas, relations and circumstances: each time
there is a veritable novel, where the landowner the thief. the
man with the j avelin, the man with bare hands ' the
the painter, take the place of concepts. ' '
This geography of relations is particularly important to the
extent that .philosophy, the history of philosophy, is en-
wtth the problem of being, IS. They discuss the
of attri?ution {the sky is blue) and the judgement
of extstence (God ts), which presupposes the other. But it is
always the to be and the question of the principle. It is
only the Enghsh and the Americans who have freed con-
junctions refl.ected on relations. This is because they have
a very spectal attitude to logic. They do not conceive it as an
ordinary form containing in itself the first principles. They tell
us, on other hand, that you will either be forc(jd to aban-
logtc, else .will be led to invent one! Logic is just
ltke the mam road, It ts not at the beginning, neither does it
have an end, one cannot stop. Precisely speaking, it is not
to create a logic of relations, to recognize the rights of
the JUdgement of relation as an autonomous sphere, distinct
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 57
from judgements of existence and attribution .. For n?thin? as
et prevents relations as they are detected m conJunctions
rNOW, THUS, etc.) from remaining subordinate to
to be. The whole of grammar, the whole of the syllog1sm, ts a
way of ma intaining the subordination of conjunctions to the
verb to be, of making them gravitate around the verb to ?e.
One must go further: one must make the encounter With
relations penetrate and corrupt everything, undermine being,
make it topple over. Substitute the AND fo: IS. !"- aruf The
AND is not even a specific relation or conJunctiOn, It ts that
which subtends all relations, the pat h of all relations, whlch
makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set
of their terms and outside everything which could be de-
termined as B; ing, One, or Whole. The AND as extra-being,
inter-being. Relations might still establish themselves between
their terms or between two sets, from one to the other, but the
AND relations another di rection, and puts to flight
terms and sets, the former and the latter on the of llight
whjch it actively creates. Thinking with AND, mstead of
thinking I S, instead of thinking/or IS: empiric.ism has never
had another secret. Try it, it is a quite extraordmary thought,
and yet it is life. The empiricists think in thjs way, that is all
there is to it. And it is not the thought of an aesthete, as when
one says 'one more', 'one more woman' . it is a
dialectical thought, as when one says 'one .two,
will give three'. The multiple is no longer an IS
still subordinate to the One which divides or the Bemg whtch
encompasses it. It has become noun, a.
constantly inhabits each thing. A ts m
terms however many there are, nor in thetr set or totality. A
is only in the AND, which does not have the same
nat ure as the elements, the sets or even their relations. While
it may come about between just two, it nevertheless . sends
dualism off course. The AND has a fundamental sobn ety, a
poverty, a n ascesis. Apart from Sartre, who caught
none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most tmportant
I
58 DialogUs
philosopher in France was J ean Wahl. He not onl y introd uced
us to an with English and American thought, but
had the ab11J ty to make us think, in French, things which were
very new; he on his own account took this art of the AND this
stammering of language in itself, this mi nori tarian of
language, the furthest.
Is it really surprising that this comes to us from English or
American? It is a hegemonic, imperialistic language. But for
this reason it is all the more vulnerable to the subterranean
workings of languages and dialects which undermine it from
all and on it a play of vas t corruptions and
vanat1ons. Those who campaign for a pure French uncon-
. '
by English, are in our view posing a false problem
whtch onl y has any validity in the discussions of intellectuals.
The American language bases its despotic offi cial pretensions
. . . . . ,
Its maJon tan an cla1m to hegemony, onl y on its extraordinary
for t wisted and shattered and for secretl y
puttmg Itself m the service of minorities who work it from
inside, involuntaril y, unofficially, nibbling away at that
hegemony as i t extends itself: the reverse of power. English
has upon by all these minority languages,
Gael1c-Eng1Jsh, Insh-English, etc., which are all so many
war-machi nes against the English: Synge's AND which takes
upon itself all conj unctions, all relations, and 'the way', 14 the
t? mark the line of language which is unfolding. 15
Amen can IS worked upon by a Black English, and also a
Yellow English, a Red English, a broken English each of
which is like a language shot wit h a spray-gun of coiours: the
very different use of the verb to be, the different usc of con-
junctions, t he conti nuous line of the AND . . . and if slaves
need to have some knowledge of standard English, it is onl y in
order to and to put language itself to Oight.
16
Oh no, it is
not a q ucstton of imitating patois or restoring dialects like the
peasant novelists, who are generally gua rdians of the estab-
lished order. It is a case of making language shift, with words
which are increasingly restrained and a syntax which is in-
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 59
creasingly subtle. It is not a queslio.n of a
as if one was a foreigner, it is a quesuon of bemg a foretgner m
one's own language, in the sense that American is indeed the
Blacks' language. Anglo-American has a bent for t hat. One
might contrast the way in which English and German
the composite words in which both languages are equally
But German is dogged by t he primacy of being, the nostalg1a
for being, and makes all the conjunctions which it uses to
create a composite word tend towards it: the cult of the Grund,
of t he tree and roots, of t he Inside. English, on t he hand,
creates composite words whose onl y link is an imph.ed AND,
relationship with the Outside, cult of t he road whtch never
P
lunges down which has no foundations, which shoots on t he
' 17 bl d
surface, rhizome. Blue-eyed boy: a boy, some ue,
eyes- an assemblage. AND ... AND. :.
Empiricism is nothing other than thts. It IS each maJ?r
language, more or less must be br?ken,. each m
its own way, to introduce t hts creauve whtch will. make
language shoot along, and will thts stranger m our
language, in so far as it is our own. Fmdm.g th.e.means. proper
to French, wit h its strength of its own mmon t tes, of Its ?wn
becoming-minor (it is a pity in this respect that many wnters
suppress punctuation, which in French is to AN.D).
T hat is what empiricism is, syntax and expenmentanon,
synta ctics and pragmatics, a matter of speed.
On Spinoz.a
Why write about Spinoza? Here again, let us take him by the
middle and not by the first principle (a single substance for all
the a ttributes). The soul AND the body; no one has ever. ha?
such an original feeling for the conjunction 'and'. Each m?t-
vidua l, body and soul, possesses an infinity wh1ch
belong to him in a more or less compl.ex .re.l auonshtp. Each
individual is also himself composed of mdtvtduals of a lower
order and enters into the composition of individuals of a
higher order. All individuals are in Nature as t hough on a
I
60 Dialogues
plane of consistence whose whole figure they form a plane
which is variable at each moment. They affect each in so
far as the relationship which constitutes each one forms a
d.egree of power, a capacity to be affected. Everything is
s1mply an encounter in the uni verse, a good or a bad en-
counter. Adam eats the apple, the forbidden fruit. This is a
of the indigestion, intoxication, poisoning type:
th1s rotten apple decomposes Adam's relationship. Adam has
a bad encounter. Whence the force of Spinoza's question:
'What can a body do?', of what affects is it capable? Affects are
sometimes they weaken us in so far as they di-
mlmsh our to act and decompose our relationships
sometimes they make us stronger in so far as they
mcrease our power and make us enter into a more vast or
superior individual Uoy). Spinoza never ceases to be amazed
by the body. He is not amazed at having a body, but by what
the can ?o. Bodies are not defined by their genus or
spec1es, by the1r organs and functions, but by what they can
do,. by th: affects of which they are capable- in passion as well
m a.ct1on. You have not defined an animal until you have
hsted Its affects. In this sense there is a greater difference
between a race horse and a work horse than between a work
horse and ox. A d!stant successor of Spinoza would say:
look at the t1ck, adm1re that creature; it is defined by three
affects, which are all it is capable of as a result of the rela-
of which it is composed, nothing but a tri-polar
world! L1ght affects it and it climbs on to the end of a branch.
The smell of a mammal affects it and it drops down on to it.
The hairs get in its way and it looks for a hairless place to
burrow under the skin and drink the warm blood. Blind and
deaf, the tick has onl y three affects in the vast forest and for
the rest of the time may sleep for years awaiting the
What po"':er, nevertheless!. Finally, one always has the organs
and funct1ons correspondmg to the affects of which one is
capable. Let us begin with the simple animals who only have a
few affects, and who are neither in our world, nor in another,
On the Superiorif:J of Anglo-American Literature 61
but with an associated world that they have learnt how to trim,
cut up, sew back together: the spider and his web, the
and the scalp, the tick and a small patch of
these and not the owl of Minerva are the true ph1losoph1cal
beasts. That which triggers ofT an affect, that which
a power to be affected, is called a the web
scalp creases, a little skin is bared. Nothmg but .a few s1gns .like
stars in an immense black night.
flea-becoming, tick-becoming, an unknown, res1hent, obscure,
stubborn life.
When Spinoza says 'The surprising thing is the body we
do not yet know what a body is capable of .. .', does not
want to make the body a model , and the soul s1mply de-
pendent on the body. He has a subtler task. He wants to
demolish the pseudo-superiority of the soul over the body.
There is the soul and the body and both express one and the
same thing: an attribute of the body is also an expressed of the
soul (for example, speed). Just as you do n?t what a
body is capable of, just as there are many thmgs m the b_o<iY
that you do not know, so there are in the. many
whjch go beyond your consciousness. Th1s IS the questiOn.
what is a body capable of? what affects are you of?
Experiment, but you need a lot of p.rudence to expenment. We
Live in a world which is generally d1sagreeable, where
people but the established powers have a stake in
sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those wh1ch
reduce our power to act. The established powers need our
sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors
of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden.
The powers that be need to repress u.s less than to us
anxious or, as Virilio says, to admm1ster and orgam.ze our
intimate little fears. The long, universal moan about hfe: the
lack-to-be1s* which is life ... In vain someone says, ' Let's
dance'; we are not really very happy. In vain someone s.ays,
' What misfortune death is'; for one would need to have
to have something to lose. Those who are sick, in soul as m
I
62 Dialogues
body, will not let go of us, the vampi res, until they have
transmitted to us their neurosis and their anxiety, their be-
loved castration, the resentment against life, fil thy contagion.
It is all a matter of blood. It is not easy to be a free man, to fl ee
the plague, organize encounters, increase the power to act, to
be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or
encompass a maxi mum of affirmation. To make the body a
power which is not reducible to the organism, to make
thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness.
Spinoza's famous fi rst principle (a single substance for all
attri butes) depends on this assemblage and not vice versa.
There is a Spinoza-assemblage: soul and body, relationships
and encounters, power to be affected, affects which realize this
power, sadness and joy which qualify these affects. Here
philosophy becomes the art of a functioning, of an assemblage.
Spinoza, the man of encounters and becoming, the
philosopher with the tick, Spinoza the imperceptible, always
in the middle, always in flight although he does not shift
much, a flight from the J ewish communi ty, a flight from the
Powers, a flight from the sick and the malignant. He may be
ill, he may himself die; he knows that death is neither the goal
nor the end, but that, on the contrary, it is a case of passing his
life to someone else. What Lawrence says about Whitman's
continuous life is well suited to Spinoza: the Soul and the
Body, the soul is neither above nor inside, it is 'with', it is on
the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company
of those who follow the same way, ' feel with them, seize the
vi bration of their soul and their body as they pass', the
opposite of a morali ty of salvation, teaching the soul to live its
life, not to save it.
On the Stoics
Why wri te about them? A darker and more agitated world has
never been set out: bodies ... but qualities are also bodies,
breaths and souls are bodies, actions and passions themselves
are bodies. Everything is a compound of bodies - bodies
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 63
interpenetrate, force each other, poison other, insinuate
themselves into each other, withdraw, or destroy
each other, as fi re penetrates iron and makes 1t red, as the
carnivore devours its prey, as the lover enters the
'There is flesh in bread, and bread in plants; these bod1es and
many others enter into all bodies, by hidden channels, and
evaporate together .. .' Thyestes' terrible _feast, and
devouring, sicknesses which are nurt ured m. our thighs,. so
many bodies which grow in our own. Who IS to wht.ch
compound is good or bad, since all is good from the vtew?omt
of the two parties which encounter one another. and mt.er-
penetra te. Which love is not that of brother and stster,
feast is not cannibalistic? But see how, from all these ?od1ly
struggles, there arises a sort of vap?ur, no
longer consists in qualities, in actions or m passions, 1.n causes
acting upon one another , but in results of these acuons and
passions, in effects which result from all these causes together.
They are pure, impassive, incorporeal events, on the of
thi ngs, pure infini tives of which it. cannot even sa1d
they ARE participating rather m an extra-bemg whtch
' ' ' ' ' t c t'
surrou.nds that which is: ' to redden , to t urn green.' o ,
' to die' 'to Jove' ... Such an event, such a verb m .the m-
finitive 'is also the expressed of a proposition or the. of
a state of things. The Stoics' strength lay in a hne of
separation pass - no longer between the senstble and the
intelligible or between the soul and the body, but where no
one had it before - between physical depth and
metaphysical surface. Between things and events. Between
states of things and compounds, causes, souls and bodies,
actions and passions, qualities and substances on one
hand, and, on the other, events or i':'"'passive, unqualifiable,
1 Efllects infi nitives wh1ch result from these
mcorporea , .
I ams
which are attri buted to these states of thmgs,
ama g , .. f 'd
which are expressed in propOSitions. A new o gettmg n
of the IS: the at tribute is no longer a quahty related the
subject by the indicative ' is', it is any verb whatever m the
66 Dialogues
histri onics of those who mimic a pure event and transform it
into a phantasm, who proclaim anxiety, finitude and
castration. One must succeed in 'establishing among men and
works their being as it was before bitterness' . Between the
cries ?f physical pain and the songs of metaphysical suffering,
how IS one to trace out one's narrow, Stoical way, which
consists in being wort hy of what happens, extracting some-
thing gay and loving in what happens, a light, an encounter,
an event, a speed, a becoming? ' For my taste for death, which
was bankruptcy of the will, I will substitute a death-wish
which will be the apotheosis of the will. ' For my pathetic wish
to be loved I will substitute a power to love: not an absurd will
to love anyone or anything, not identifying myself with the
uni verse, but extracting the pure event which unites me with
those whom I love, who await me no more than I await them
. . ,
smce the event a lone awaits us, Eventum tantum. Making an
event - however small - is the most delicate thing in the
world: the opposite of maki ng a drama or making a story.
Loving those who are like this: when they enter a room they
are not persons, characters or subjects, but an atmospheric
variation, a change of hue, an imperceptible molecule, a dis-
crete population, a fog or a cloud of droplets. Everything has
reall y changed. Great events, too, are made in this way:
battle, revol ution, life and death ... True Entities are events
,
not concepts. It is not easy to think in terms of the event. All
the harder since thought itself then becomes an event.
Scarcely anyone other than the Stoics and the English have
thought in this way. ENTITY= EVENT, it is terror, but also
great j oy. Becoming an entity, an infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke
of it, the horrific and luminous story of Carter:
animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptible-
becoming.
It is very difficult to speak of present-day science, of what
scientists do, in so far as one understands it. One has the
impression that the ideal of science is no longer axiomatic or
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 67
structural at all. An axiomatics was the extraction of a
structure which made the variable elements to which it was
applied homogeneous or homologous. This was a recoding
operation, the reintroduction of order into the sciences, for
science has never ceased to be delirious [dilirer], to make
completely decoded fluxes of knowledge and obj ects pass
along lines of flight, continuall y going further afi eld. There is
thus a whole politics which demands that the lines should be
blocked, that an order should be established. T hink, for ex-
ample, about the role which Louis de Broglie had in physics,
in preventing indeterminism from going too far, in calming
the madness of particles: a restoration of order. Today it
seems rather that the delirium of science is having a revival. It
is not just the race to find undiscoverable particles. Science is
becoming increasingly event-centred [ivinementielle] instead of
structural . It follows lines and circuits, it takes leaps, rather
than constructing axiomatics. A sign of this is the dis-
appearance of schemas of arborescence, to give way to
rhizomatic movements. Scientists are more and more con-
cerned witth singular events, of an incorporal nature, wnich
are effected in bodies, in states of bodies, in completely
heterogeneous assemblages (whence the call for interdis-
ciplinarity). This is very different from a structure wit h any
elements whatever , it is an event of heterogeneous bodies, an
event as s uch which crosses varied structures and specified
sets. No longer is it a structure which frames isomorphic sets;
it is an event which passes across irreducible domains. Take,
for example, the 'catastrophe' event, studied by the mathema-
tician Rene Thorn. Or else the reproduction-event, 'to repro-
duce', which happens in a gel, but also in an epidemic or in a
news item. Or else the TO MOVE ABOUT which can affect
the course of a taxi in a town or of a fl y in a swarm: this is not
an axiom, but an event which is extended between qualified
sets. They no longer extract a struct ure common to any
clements whatever, they spread out an event, they counter-
effectuate an event which cuts different bodies and is effected
68 Dialogues
in varied structures. There are, as it were, infinitive verbs,
lines of becoming, lines which shoot between domains and
leap from one domain to another, interregnums. Science will
be increasingly like grass, in the middle, between things and
between other things, accompanying their flight (it is true that
the apparatus of power will increasingly demand a restoration
of order, a recoding of science).
English humour (?), J ewish humour, Stoic humour, Zen
humour: what a strange broken li ne. An ironist is someone
who discusses principles; he is seeking a first principle, a
principle which comes even before the one that was thought to
be first, he finds a course which is even more primary than the
others. He constantl y goes up and down. This is why he
proceeds by questioning, he is a man of conversation, of
dialogue, he has a particular tone, always of the signifier.
Humour is completely the opposite: principles count for little,
everything is taken literally, the consequences are expected of
you {this is why humour is not transmitted through plays on
words, puns, which are of the signifier, and like a principle
within the principle). Humour is the art of consequences or
effects: OK, fine, you give me this? You' ll see what happens.
Humour is treacherous, it is treason. Humour is atonal
'
absolutely imperceptible, it makes something shoot off. It
never goes up or down, it is on the surface: surface effects.
Humour is an art of pure events. The arts of Zen, archery,
gardening or taking tea, are exercises to make the event surge
forth and dazzle on a pure surface. J ewish humour versus
Greek irony, J ob-humour versus Oedipus-irony, insular
humour versus continental irony, Stoic humour versus
Platonic irony, Zen humour versus Buddhist irony, masochist
humour versus sadist irony, Proust-humour versus
Gide-irony, etc. The whole destiny of irony is linked to repres-
entation, irony ensures the individuation of the represented or
the subjectivation of the representer. Classical irony, in fact,
consists in showing that what is most universal in represen-
tation is the same as the extreme individuality of the represen-
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 69
ted which serves as its principle (classical irony culminates in
the theological affirmation according to which ' the w.hole of
the possible' is at the same time the re.ality of God as
being). Romantic irony, for its part, discovers the subjeCtiVIty
of the principle of all possible representation. These probl.ems
are no concern of humour, which has always undermmed
games of principles or causes in favour of the event
of individuation or subjectivation in favour of muluphcmes.
Irony contains an insufferable claim: that of belonging to a
superior race, of being the preserve of the masters (a
text of Renan says this without irony, for irony dnes up
quickly when talking of itself). Humour, on the other .hand,
claims kinship with a minority, with a minority-becommg. It
is humour which makes a language stammer, which imposes
on it a minor usage, or which constitutes a complete bilingual
system within the same language. And, indeed, it never
volves plays on words (there is not a single play m
Lewis Carroll), but events of language, a mmontanan
language, which has itself become creator events. Or
might there be ' indefinite' plays on words which would be hke
a becoming instead of a completion?
What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made
up of many heterogeneous terms and which
liaisons relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns
- natures. Thus, the assemblage' s only unity is that
of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a 'sympathy'. It is never
filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are
not successions, Lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics,
the wind. Magicians are well aware of this. An animal . is
defined less by its genus, its species, its organs, and tts
functions, than by the assemblages into which it enters. 'J_'ake
an assemblage of the type man-animal-manufactured obJect:
MAN-HORSE-STIRRUP. Technologists have explained
that the stirrup made possible a new military unity i.n giying
the knight lateral stability: the lance could be tucked m
one arm it benefits from all the horse's speed, acts as a pomt
'
70 Dialogues
which is immobile itself but propelled by the gallop. 'The
stirrup replaced the energy of man by the power of the
animal. ' This is a new man-animal symbiosis, a new
assemblage of war, defined by its degree of power or
' freedom', its affects, its circulation of affects: what a set of
bodies is capable of. Man and the animal enter into a new
relationship, one changes no less than the other, the battlefi eld
is fill ed with a new type of affects. It must not be thought,
however, that the invention of the stirrup is sufficient. An
assemblage is never technological; if anything, it is the
opposite. Tools always presuppose a machine, and the
machine is always social before being technical. There is
always a social machine which selects or assigns the technical
elements used. A tool remains marginal, or little used, until
t h r ~ exists a social machine or collecti ve assemblage which is
capable of taking it into its ' phylum'. In the case of the stirrup,
it was the grant of land, linked to the benefi ciary's obligation
to serve on horseback, which was to impose the new cavalry
and harness the tool in the complex assemblage of feudalism.
(Formerly the stirrup had either been used, but used in
another way, in the context of a completely different
assemblage- for example, of nomads- or else it was known
but not used, or used only in a very limited way, as in the
battle of Adrianople.
20
) The feudal machine combines new
relationships with the earth, war, the animal, but also with
culture and games (tournaments), with woman (courtly love):
all sorts of fluxes enter into conj unction. How can the
assemblage be refused the name it deserves, 'desire'? Here
desire becomes feudal. Here, as elsewhere, it is the set of the
affects which are transformed and circulate in an assemblage
of symbiosis, defined by the co-functioning of its
heterogeneous parts.
First, in an assemblage there are, as it were, two faces, or at
the least two heads. There are stales of things, states of bodies
(bodies interpenetrate, mix together, transmit affects to one
another); but also utterances, regimes of utterances: signs are
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 71
organized in a new way, new formulations appear, a new style
for new gestures (the emblems which individualize the knight,
the fonnulas of oaths, the system of ' declarations', even of love,
etc.). Utterances are not part of ideology, there is no ideology:
utterances, no less than states of thi ngs, are components and
cog-wheels in the assemblage. There is no base or superstructure
in an assemblage; a monetary flux in itself involves as many
utterances as a flux of words, for its part, can involve money.
Utterances are not content to describe corresponding states of
things: these are rather, as it were, two non-parallel for-
malizations, the formalization of expression and the for-
malization of content, such that one never does what one says,
one never says what one does, although one is not lying, one is
not deceiving or being deceived, one is only assembling signs
and bodies as heterogeneous components of the same machine.
The only unity derives from the fact that one and the same
function, one and the same ' functive', is the expressed of the
utterance and the attribute of the state of body: an event which
stretches out or contracts, a becoming in the infinitive. To
feudalize? In an indissoluble way an assemblage is both machine
assemblage of effectuation and collective assemblage of
enunciation. In enunciation, in the production of utterances,
there is no subject, but always collective agents: and in what the
utterance speaks of there are no objects, but machinic states.
These are like the variables of the function, which constantly
interlace their values or their segments. No one has shown these
two complementary faces of any assemblage more clearly than
Kafka. If there is a Kafkaesque world, it is certainly not that of
the strange or the absurd, but a world in which the most extreme
juridicial formalization of utterances (questions and answers,
objections, pleading, summing up, reasoned judgement,
verdict), coexists with the most intense machinic formalization,
the machinization of states of things and bodies (ship-machine,
hotel-machine, circus-machine, castle-machine, lawsuit
machine). One and the same K-function, with its collective
agents and bodily passions, Desire.
72 Dialogues
And then there is yet another axis along which assemblages
must be divided. This ti me it is according to the movements
which animate them, which determine or carry them along,
which determine or carry along desire, with its states of things
and utterances. There is no assemblage without territory,
wi thout territoriality and reterri torialization which incl udes
all sorts of artifices. But is there any assemblage wi thout a
point of deterritorialization, without a line of flight which
leads it on to new creations, or else towards death? Let us keep
to the example of FEUDALISM. Feudal territorialities, or
rather reterritorialization, since it is a case of a new dis-
tribution of land and a whole system of sub-infeudation; and
does the knight not reterritorialize himself on his mount with
stirrups, for he can sleep on his horse? But at the same time,
either at the beginning or else towards the end, there is a vast
movement of deterritorialization: deterritorialization of the
empire and, above all, of the church, whose landed wealth is
confiscated to be given to the knights. And this movement
fi nds an outlet in the Crusades. However, in their turn, the
Crusades bring about a reterritorialization of empire and
church (the spiri tual land, Christ's tomb, the new commerce);
and the knight has always been inseparable from his
wandering path, impelled by a wi nd, from his de-
terri torialization on horseback; and serfdom itself is insepar-
able from its feudal territoriality, but also from all the pre-
capitalist deterritorializations wi th which it is already shot
through.
21
The two movements coexist in an assemblage and
yet are not equivalent, they do not balance out, are not
symmetrical. We might say of the earth, or rather of the
artificial reterritoriali zation which constantly takes place, that
it gives a particular substance to the content, a particular code
to the utterances, a particular limit to becoming, a particular
indicative mood (present, past, future) to time. But it might
be said that the deterri torialization which takes place at the
same time- although from different points of view - does not
affect the earth any less: it liberates a pure matter, it undoes
On the Superiority of Anglo-American 73
codes, it carries expressions, contents, states of and
utterances along a zigzag broken line of flight, it raise tune to
the infi nitive, it releases a becoming which no Ionge has any
limit because each term is a stop which must be j um>ed over.
It comes down to Blanchot's fine phrase: 'to reease 'the
part of the event which its accomplishment cannot a
pure dying or smiling or fighting or hati ng or lovingor gomg
away or creating ... A return to dualism? No, the two
movements are caught up in each other, the aemb lage
arr anges them both, everythi ng happens between the two.
Here again, there is a K-function, another axis whi:h Kafka
traced out in the dual movement of territorialitie! and de-
terri torialization.
There is indeed a historical question of the as:emblage:
particular heterogeneous elements caught in the fun:tion, the
circumstances in which they are caught up, the stt of rela-
tionships which at a particular moment uni tes mar,
tools and environment. But man also never stopl anJmal-
becoming, tool-becoming, environment-becoming, tccording
to another question within these very assemblages. Man only
becomes animal if the ani mal, for its part, beconts sound,
colour or line. It is a bloc of becoming which is al ways
assymetrical . It is not that the two are exchanged, fer they are
not exchanged at all, but the one only becomes the ether
other becomes something yet other, and if the diS-
appear. As Lewis Carroll says, it is when the smile a
cat that man can effectively become cat as soon as htSmtles. lt
is not man who sings or paints, it is man who becom'!S
but at exactly the same time as the ani mal becomes mus1c, or
pure colour, or an astonishingly simple line: with
birds it is the man who becomes a bird, becaust the b1rd
becomes music. Melville's mariner becomes albatross when
the albatross itself becomes extraordi nary whi te11ess, pure
vibration of whi te (and Captain Ahab's whale-becoming
forms a blocwith Moby Dick's whi te-becoming, white
wall ). So is this it, to paint, to compose or to It IS all a
74 Dialogues
questior. of line, there is no substantial difference between
painting, music and writing. These activities are differentiated
from one another by their respective substances, codes and
territorialities, but not by the abstract line they trace, which
shoots between them and carries them towards a common
fate. When we come to trace the line, we can say ' It is
philosophy.' Not at all because philosophy would be an
ultimate discipline, a last root, containing the truth of the
others, on the contrary. Still less is it a popular wisdom. It is
because philosophy is born or produced outside by the
painter, the musician, the writer, each time that the melodic
li ne draws along tht: sound, or the pure traced line colour, or
the written line the articulated voice. There is no need for
philosophy: it is necessarily produced where each activity
gives rise to its line of deterritorialization. To get out of
philosophy, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce
it from outside. The philosophers have always been something
else, they were born from something else.
Writing is very simple. Either it is a way ofreterritorializing
oneself, conforming to a code of dominant utterances, to a
territory of established states of things: not just schools and
authors, but all those who write professionally, even in a non-
literary sense. Or else, on the other hand, it is becoming,
becoming something other than a writer, since what one is
becoming at the same time becomes something other than
writing. Not every becoming passes through writing, but
everything which becomes is an object of wri ting, painting or
music. Everything which becomes is a pure line which ceases
to represent whatever it may be. It is sometimes said that the
novel reached its culminating point when it adopted an
anti-hero as a character: an absurd, strange and disoriented
creature who wanders about continually, deaf and bli nd. But
this is the substance of the novel: from Beckett back to
Chretien de Troyes, from Lawrence back to passing
through the whole history of the English and American novel.
Chretien de Troyes constantly traced the line of the
On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 75
wandering knights who sleep on horseback, supported by
their lance and stirrups, who no longer know thei r name or
destination, who constantly set off in zigzag line, who climb
into the first cart to come along, even at the expense of their
honour. The knight's point of deterritorialization. Sometimes
in a feverish haste on the abstract line which carries them off,
sometimes in the black hole of the catatonia which absorbs
them. It is the wind, even a wind from the backyard, which
sometimes hurries us along, sometimes immobilizes us. A
KNIGHT TO SLEEP ON HIS HORSE. I am a poor
lonesome cowboy.
22
Writing has no other goal: wind, even
when we do not move, ' keys in the wind to set my spirit to
flight and give my thought a gust of air from the backyard' -
to release what can be saved from life, that which can save
itself by means of power and stubbornness, to extract from the
event that which is not exhausted by the happening, to release
from becoming that which will not permit itself to be fixed in a
term. A strange ecology, tracing a line of writing, music or
painti ng. These are ribbons stirred by the wind. A little air
passes. A line is traced, the stronger for being abstract, if it is
quite restrained, without figures. Writing is made of motor
agitation and inertia: Kleist. It is true that one writes only for
illiterates, for those who do not read or at least for those who
will not read you. One wri tes always for animals, like
Hofmannsthal who used to say that he felt a rat in his throat,
and this used to show its teeth, ' nuptials or participation
agai nst nature', symbiosis, involution. Only the animal in
man is addressed . This does not mean writing about one's
dog, one's cat, one's horse or one's favourite animal. It does
not mean making animals speak. It means writing as a rat
traces a line, or as it twists its tail, as a bird sends out a sound,
as a cat moves or else sleeps heavily. Animal-becoming, on
condition that the animal, rat, horse, bird or cat, itself be-
comes something else, bloc, line, sound, colour of sand - an
abstract line. For everything which changes passes along that
line: assemblage. Bei ng a sea-louse, which sometimes leaps up
76 Dialogues
and_ sees whole beach, sometimes remains hidden, its nose
a smgle grain of sand. Do you know which animal you
are m _t he. process of becoming and in particular what it is
m you, Lovecraft's Thing or Entity, the nameless,
. the mtellect,ual beas_t' , the less intellectual for writing with
ItS wooden clogs, w1th Its dead eye, its antennae and man-
dibles, its absence of face, a whole mob inside you in pursuit of
what, a witch's wind?
3
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse
I
We've only said two things against psychoanalysis: that it
breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations
of utterances. In this way it wrecks both aspects of the
assemblage: the machine assemblage of desire and the col-
lective assemblage of enunciation. T he fact is that
psychoanalysis talks a lot about the unconscious - it even
discovered it. But in practice, it always diminishes, destroys
and exorcises it. The unconscious is understood as a negative,
it's the enemy. Woes war, solllch werden. In vai n has this been
translated as: 'There where it was, there as subj ect must I
come' - it's even worse (including the soli, that strange ' duty
in an ethical sense'}. What psychoanal ysis calls production or
formation of the unconscious, are failures, conflicts, compro-
mises or puns. In the case of desires, there are always too
many for psychoanalysis: ' polymorphous pervert' . You will be
taught about ' Lack', 'Culture' and ' Law'. This is not a matter
of theory, but of the well-known practical art of
psychoanalysis, the art of interpretation. And when we move
from interpretation to signifi ance, from the search for the
signified to the great discovery of the signifier, the situation
does not seem to have changed much. Among the most
grotesque passages in Freud are those on ' fellatio' : how the
penis stands for the cow's udder, and the cow's udder for a
mother's breast. A way of showing that fellat io is not a ' true'
desi re, but means something else, conceals something else.
Something always has to recall something else- metaphor or
78 Dialogues
metonymy. Psychoana lysis becomes more and more
Ciceronian and Freud has always been a Roman. In order to
renew the old distinction between true desire and false desire
psychoanalysis makes use of a grid which is perfect for
purpose: the true contents of desire would be partial dri ves
[pulsions parlielles] or partial obj ects; the true expression of
desire would be Oedipus, or castration, or death - one in-
stance to structure the whole. As soon as desire assembles
[agenceJ something- in connection with an Outside, in con-
nection with a becoming - the assemblage is broken up. As
with fellatio: oral drive of sucking the breast + Oedipal
structural accident. It's the same for everything else. Before
psychoanalysis people used to talk about old men's revolting
obsessions; with it, they talk about perverse childish activity.
We say, on the contrary: you haven' t got hold of the uncon-
scious, you never get hold of it, it is not an ' it was' in place of
which the ' I' must come. The Freudian formula must be
reversed. You have to produce the unconscious. It is not at all
a matter of repressed memories or even of phantasms. You
don' t reproduce childhood memories, you produce blocs of
child-becoming with blocs of childhood which are always in the
present. A man manufactures or assembles [agence], not with
the egg from which he emerged, nor with the progenitors who
a ttach him to it, nor with the images that he draws from it nor
with the structure of germination, but with the of
placenta which he has hidden, and which is always con-
temporary with him, as raw materi al to experiment with.
Produce some unconscious, and it is not easy, it is not just
anywhere, not with a slip of the tongue, a pun or even a
dream. The unconscious is a substance to be manufactured, to
get fl owing - a social and political space to be conquered.
There is no subject of desire, any more than there is an object.
There is no subject of enunciation. Fluxes are the onl y
of ? esire itself. Desire is the sys tem of a-signifying
s1gns With wh1ch fluxes of the unconscious are produced in a
social fi eld. There is no blossoming of desi re, wherever it
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 79
happens- in an unremarkable famil y or a local school - which
does not call established structures into question. Desire is
revolutionary because it always wants more connections and
assemblages. But psychoanalysis cuts ofT and beats down all
connections, all assemblages- it hates desire, it hates politics.
The second cnucsm concerns the way in which
psychoanal ysis prevents the formation of utteran.ces.
Assemblages - in their content - are populated by becommgs
and intens1ues, by intensive circulations, by various
multiplicities (packs, masses, species, races, populations,
tribes ... ) . And in their expression, assemblages handle inde-
finite articles or pronouns which are not at all indeterminate
('a' tummy, 'some' people, 'one' hits ' a' child .. . ) -verbs in
the infinitive which are not undifferentiated but which mark
processes (to walk, to kill, to lbve ... ) - proper names which
are not people but events (they can be groups, animals, en-
tities, singularities, collectives, everything that is written with
a capital letter, A-HANS-BECOMING-HORSE). The col-
lective machine assemblage is a material production of desire
as well as an expressive cause of utterance: a semiotic
a rticulation of chains of expressions whose contents are rela-
tively the least formalized. Not representing a subject - for
there is no subject of enunciation - but programming an
assemblage. Not overcoding utterances but, on the contrary,
preventing them from toppling under the tyranny of
s upposedly significant combinations. Now, it is curious
psychoanalysis - which boasts that it has so much -
understands nothing of the logic of the indefinite article, of the
infinitive of the verb and of the proper name. The
psychoanal yst wants there to be, at all costs, a definite, a
possessive, a personal, hidden behind the indefinite. When
Melanie Klein's children say 'a tummy' or ask ' How do
people grow up?', Melanie Klein hears ' my
or ' Will I be big like my daddy?' When they say a Huler , a
Churchill' , Melanie Klein sees here the possessive of the bad
mother or of the good father. Military men and weathermen -
80 Dialogues
more than psychoanalysts - have at least got the sense of the
proper name when they use it to refer to a strategic operation or
geographical process: Operation Typhoon. On one occasion
J ung tells Freud about one of his dreams: he has dreamed of an
ossuary. Freud wants Jung to have desired someone's death,
doubtless that of his wife. 'Surprised, Jung pointed out to him
that there were several skulls, not just one.'
1
In the same way,
Freud does not want there to be six or seven wolves: there will
only be one representative of the father. And again, there is what
Freud does with little Hans: he takes no account of the
assemblage {building-street-nextdoor-warehouse-omnibus-
horse-a-horse-falls-a-horse-is-whipped!); he takes no account of
the situation {the child had been forbidden to go into the street,
etc.); he takes no account of little Hans's endeavour (horse-
becoming, because every other way out has been blocked up: the
childhood bloc, the bloc of Hans's animal-becoming, the in-
finitive as marker of a becoming, the line of flight or the
movement of detcrritorialization). The only important thing for
Freud is that the horse be the father- and that's the end of it. In
practice, given an assemblage, extracting a segment from it,
abstracting a moment from it, is sufficient to break up the
ensemble of desire, to break up becoming in act [Le deuenir m acte],
and to substitute for them over-imaginary resemblances (a horse
= my daddy) or analogies of over-symbolic relationships (to
buck = to make love). All the real-desire has already dis-
appeared: a code is put in its place, a symbolic overcoding of
utterances, a fi ctitious subject of enunciation who doesn' t give
the patients a chance.
If you go to be psychoanalysed, you believe that you will be
able to talk and because of this belief you accept the need to pay.
But you don't have the least chance of talking. Psychoanal ysis is
entirely designed to prevent people from talking and to remove
from them all conditions of true enunciation. We have formed a
small working group for the following task: to read reports of
psychoanalysis, especiall y of children; to stick exclusively to
these reports and make two columns, on the left what the child
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 81
a
.d according to the account itself, and on the right what the
S I 1
psychoanalyst heard ~ d retai.ne.d (cf. always the card trick ~ f
the ' forced choice' ). It s hornfymg. The two central texts m
this respect are Freud' s little Hans and Melanie Klein's Little
Richard. It's an amazing forcing,
2
like a boxing match be-
tween categories which are too unequal. At the outset there is
Richard's humour, which makes fun of M.K. All these
assemblages of desire on his part pass through a mapping
activity during the war: a distribution of proper names, of
territorialities and deterritorializing movements, thresholds
and crossings. Insensitive and deaf, impervious, Mrs K. is
going to break little Richard's strength. The leitmotif of the
book is in the text itself: ' Mrs K. interpreted, Mrs K. interpre-
ted, Mrs K. INTERPRETED .. .' It is said that there is no
longer any of this today: signifiance has replaced interpre-
tation, the signifier has replaced the signified, the analyst's
silence has replaced the commentaries, castration is revealed
to be more certain than Oedipus, structural functions have
replaced parental images, the name of the Father has replaced
my daddy. We see no important practical changes. A patient
cannot mutter 'mouths of the Rhone' [bouches du RhOne] with-
out being corrected - ' mother's mouth' [bouche de La mere];
another cannot say, ' I would like to j oin a' hippie group'
[groupe hippie] wit hout being asked ' Why do you pronounce it
big pee?' (gros pipi]. These two examples form part of analyses
based on the highest signifier. And what could analysis consist
of, if not these kind of things about which the analyst no
longer even needs to talk because the person analysed knows
them as well as he does? The person analysed has therefore
become the analyser - a particularly comic term. It' s all very
well to say to us: you understand nothing, Oedipus, it's not
daddy-mummy, it's the symbolic, the law, the arrival at
culture, it' s the effect of the signifier, it's the finitude of the
subj ect, it has the ' lack-to-be
3
* which is life'. And if it's not
Oedipus, it will be castration, and the supposed death drives.
Psychoanalysts teach infinite resignation, they are the last
82 Dialogues
priests (no, there will be others after them). It cannot be said
that they are very j oll y; see the dead look they have, their stiff
necks (onl y Lacan has kept a certain sense of laughter, but he
admits that he is forced to laugh alone). They are right to say
that they need to be ' remunerated' to put up with the burden
of what they hear; they have none the less given up supporti ng
the thesis of a symbolic and disinterested role for money in
psychoanalysis. We open by chance some article by an auth-
oritative psychoanalyst, a two-page article: ' Man's long de-
pendence, his powerlessness to help himself ... the human
being's congenital inferiority ... the narcissistic wound in-
herent in his existence . .. the painful reality of the human
condition ... which implies incompletion, conflict ... his in-
trinsic misery, which it is true leads him to the most elevated
creations.' A priest would have been long since hounded out of
his church for sustaining so insolent and obscurantist a style.
But yes, nevertheless, many things have changed in
psychoanalysis. Either it has swamped, it is spread into all
sorts, of techniques of therapy, of adjustment or even marketing,
to which it brought its particular touch in a vast syncretism, its
little line in group polyphony. Or it has hardened, in a re-
finement, a very lofty ' return' to Freud, a solitary harmony, a
triumphant specifyi ng that wants no more pacts except with
linguistics (even if the reverse is not true). But whatever their
considerable difference, we believe that these two opposed
directions provide evidence of the same changes, of the same
evolution, which bears on several points.
( I) First, psychoanalysis has displaced its centre- from the
family to married life. I t sets itself up between spouses, lovers
or friends rather than between parents and children. Even
children arc guided by psychologists rather than being led
along by their parents- or parent-child relations are regulated
by radio consultations. The phantasm has made childhood
memory redundant. This is a practical remark, which bears
on the recruitment of people to be psychoanalysed: this re-
cruitment takes place less and less accordi ng to the genealogy
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 83
of the family tree and more and more according to the circle of
friends ('You ought to get analysed as well' ). As Serge
Leclaire says, perhaps humorously, ' there are now analyses
where the circles of allegiance of couches frequented by friends
and lovers take the place of relations of kinship' .
4
This is of
some importance to the actual form of problems: neurosis has
abandoned hereditary models (even ifheredity moves through
a family milieu) to pursue patterns of contagion. Neurosis has
acquired its most frightening power, that of propagation by
contagion: ' I will not let go of you until you have joined me in
this condition.' We admire the discretion of the earlier
neurotics, of the hysterics or obsessionals, who either got on
with their business alone or did it in the family: the modern
depressive types are, on the contrary, particularly vampiric or
poisonous. They take it on themselves to bring about
Nietzsche's prophecy: they cannot bear the existence of 'a'
health; they will constantly draw us into their clutches. Yet to
cure them would mean first destroying this will to venom in
them. But how could the psychoanalyst do this - the same
man who deri ves from it an excellent self-recruitment of his
clientele? It might have been thought that May 68 would have
dealt a mortal blow to psychoanalysis an,d would have made
the style of specifically psychoanalytic utterances seem
absurd. No, so many young people have returned to
psychoanalysis. Precisely because it was able to abandon its
discredited fami ly model in order to take up a still more
worryi ng direction, a ' political' micro-contagion instead of a
' private' macro-lineage. Never has psychoanalysis been so full
of life, whether because it has succeeded in penetrating every-
thing, or because it has established new foundations for its
transcendent position, its specific Order.
(2) Historicall y, psychiatry does not seem to hs to have
been constituted around the notion of madness but, on the
contrary, at the point where this notion proved difficult to
apply. Psychiatry essentially ran up against the problem of
cases of delirium where the intellectual faculty was intact. On
84 Dialogues
the one hand, there are people who seem to be mad, but who
are not ' really' so, having kept their faculties, and fi rst and
foremost the faculty of properly managi ng their money and
their possessions (paranoid conduct, the deli rium of interpre-
tation, etc.).
5
On the other hand, there are people who are
' reall y' mad and yet don't seem to be, suddenly committing an
outrageous act which nothing led us to foresee, arson, murder,
etc. (monomaniac conduct, the delirium of passion or re-
venge). If the psychiatrist has a bad conscience, it is because
he has had one since the outset, because he is implicated in the
dissolution of the notion of madness: he is accused of treating
as insane certain people who are not exactly so, and of not
seeing in time the madness of others who clearly are.
Psychoanalysis slipped between these two poles, saying that
we were at once all insane without seeming to be, but also that
we seemed mad without being so. A whole ' psychopathology
of everyday life'. In short, it is around the failure of the notion
of madness that psychiatry is consti tuted and that
psychoanalysis has been able to link up wi th it. I t is difficult to
add anything to the analyses first of Foucault, then of Robert
Castel, when they show how psychoanalysis has grown in the
soil of psychiatry.
6
By discovering between the two poles the
world of neurotics, their intellectual faculties intact, and even
absence of delir ium, psychoanalysis, at its inception,
succeeded in bri nging off a very important manoeuvre: getting
all sorts of people to go through the liberal contractual rela-
tionship who had until then seemed excluded from it
('madness' put all those it aflli cted outside all possible con-
tracts). The specifically psychoanalytic contract, a flux of
words for a flux of money, was going to make the
psychoanalyst someone able to insert himself into every pore
of the society occupied by these doubtful cases. But the more
psychoanalysis saw it was gaining ground, the more it turned
towards the deliriums concealed behind neuroses, the less it
seems to have been happy with the contractual relationship -
even if, on the face of it, it was retained. Psychoanalysis had in
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 85
fact achieved what was the source of Freud's anxiety at the
end of his life; it had become interminable, interminable in
principle. At the same ti me, it assumed a ' mass' function. For
what defi nes a mass function is not necessarily a collective,
class or group character; it is the j uridical transition from
contract to statute. It seems more and more that
psychoanalysis is acquiring an untransferable, inalienable,
statutory fixity, rather than entering into a temporary contractual
relationship. Precisely by setting itself up between the two poles
where psychiatry came up against its limits, by enlarging the
field between these two poles and exploring it, psychoanalysis
was to invent a statute law of mental illness or psychic
difficul ty which constantly renewed itself and spread out into
a systematic network. A new ambition was being offered to us:
psychoanalysis is a lifelong affait.
The i mportance of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris is perhaps
particularl y connected to the fact that it expressed for the first
time the requirements of a new psychoanalytic order, not just
in theory, but in its statutory organization, in its founding
acts. For what it clearly proposes is a psychoanalytic statute,
in opposition to the old contract: at a stroke it envisages a
bureaucratic mutation, the transition from a bureaucracy of
the eminent {the radical-socialist type, which suited the be-
ginnings of psychoanalysis) to a mass bureaucracy; this time
an ideal of givi ng out statutory documents like cer tificates of
citizenshi p, identity cards, in contrast to limited contracts.
Psychoanal ysis invokes Rome, assumes a Ciceronian air and
sets up its boundary between ' Honestas' and 'the rabble'.' If
the Ecole Freudienne has brought so many problems to the
psychoanalytic world, it is not simply as a result of its
theoretical hauteur or of its practice, but because of its plan
for a new explicit organization. The other psychoanalytic
bodies may have judged this proj ect to be inappropriate; but
they did so because it told the trut h about a change which
affects t he whole of psychoanalysis and which the other organ-
izations preferred silently to leave alone, under the cover of
.l
86 Dialogues
the contractual motif. We do not regret the passing of this
contractual cover-up which was hypocritical from the start.
Moreover, we are not saying that psychoanalysis is now con-
cerned with the masses, but si mpl y that it has assumed a mass
function - whether this was phantasmal or restricted, or for an
'elite'. And this is the second aspect of its change: not only to
have moved from family to conjugality, from kinship to
match, from lineage to contagion, but also from contract to
statute. On occasion the interminable year s of psychoanalysis
give social workers additional 'salary increments';
psychoanalysis can be seen permeating every part of the social
sector.
8
This seems to us to be more important than the
practice and the theory which in general outline have stayed
the same. Hence the reversal of the rela tions between
psychoanalysis and psychiatry, hence psychoanalysis'
ambition to become an official language; hence its pacts with
linguistics (we do not have a contractual relationship with
language).
(3) Yet the theory itself has changed, seems to have
changed. The transition from the signified to the signifier: if
we no longer look for a signified for supposedl y significant
symptoms; if we look, on the contrary, for the signifier for
symptoms which would be no more than its effect; if interpre-
tation gives way to signifiance - then a new shift takes place.
Psychoanalysis then has, in effect, its own references and has
no more use. for an external ' referent' . Everything that
happens in psychoanalysis in the analyst's consulting room is
true. What happens elsewhere is derived or secondary. An
excellent method for encouraging trust. Psychoanalysis has
ceased to be an experimental science in order to get hold of an
axiomatic system. Psychoanalysis, index sui; no other truth
than that which emerges from the operation which pre-
supposes it; the couch has become the bottomless well , inter-
minable in principle. Psychoanalysis has stopped being ' in
search or because it is now constitutive of truth. Once agai n,
it is Serge Leclai re who puts it most succinctl y: 'The reality of
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 87
the primitive scene tends to reveal itself more concre.tely by
means of the analytic consulting room than m the
surroundings of the parental bedroom .. . From a figurati ve
version, we move to the version of reference, a structural one,
revealing the reali ty of a literal manoeuvre . . . T he
psychoanalysts couch has become the place where the game of
confront ing the real properly unfolds.' The psychoanalyst has
become like the journalist: he creates the event. At any rate,
psychoanalysis advertises its wares. So it in_terpreted
or so long as it interprets (search for a s1gmfi ed), It returns
desires and utterances to a condition which is deviant by
comparison with the established order, by
dominant meanings, but by the same token localizes them m
the pores of this dominant, established body, like something
which can be translated and exchanged by virtue of a con-
tract. When it discovers the signifier, it appeals to a
specifically psychoanal ytic order (the symbolic order in
opposition to the imaginary order of the
need is itself, because it is statutory or structural: It IS 1t wh1ch
develops a body, a sufficient by itself.
Once again we clearly come up against the question of
power, of the apparatus of psychoanal ytic power - with the
same inflections as before: even if this power is narrow,
localized, etc. This question can only be posed in terms of very
general remarks: it is true, as Foucault says, that every for-
mation of power needs a form of knowledge which, while not
dependent on it, would itself lack all effectiveness without it.
Now this usable knowledge may take two shapes: either an
unofficial form, so that it can set itself up in the ' pores', to seal
some hole or other in the established order; or an offi cial form,
when it itself constitutes a symbolic order which gives a gener-
alized axiomatic system to the established powers. For ex-
ample, the historians of antiquity show the complementarity
of Greek city and Euclidean geometry. It was not because the
geometricians had power but because Euclidean geometry
constituted the knowledge, or the abstract machine, that the
88 Dialogues
city needed for its organization of power, space and time.
There is no State which does not need an image of thought
which will serve as its axiomatic system or abstract machine,
and to which it gives in return the strength to function: hence
the inadequacy of the concept of ideology, which in no way
takes into account this relationship. This was the unhappy
role of classical philosophy - as we have seen it - that of
suppl yi ng, in this way, the apparatuses of power, Church and
State, with the knowledge which suited them. Could we say
today that the human sciences have assumed this same role,
tbat of providing by their own methods an abstract machine
for modern apparatuses of power - receiving from them
valuable endorsement in return? So psychoanalysis has sub-
mitted its tender, to become a major official language and
knowledge in place of philosophy; to provide an axiomatic
system of man in place of mathematics; to invoke the Hon-
estas and a mass function. It is doubtful whether it is
succeeding: the apparatuses of power have more interest in
turning to physics, biology or informatics. But psychoanalysis
will have done what it could: it no longer serves the estab-
lished order unoffi cially: it offers a specific and symbolic
order, an abstract machine, an offi cial language that it tries to
weld on to linguistics in general, to assume a position of
Invariant. It is more and more concerned with pure ' thought'.
Living psychoanalysis. Dead psychoanalysis, because it has
little chance of succeeding in its ambition, because there are
too many competitors and because, at the present time, all the
forces of minority, all the forces of becoming, all the forces of
language, all the forces of art, are in the process of fleeing from
this particular ground - in the process of talking, thinking,
acting and becoming in other ways. Everything is happening
by another route which psychoanalysis can't even intercept,
or which psychoanalysis only intercepts in order to stop. And
this is the very task which it sets itself: to overcode
assemblages in order to subject desires to signifying chains,
utterances to the status of subjective examples - all of which
../
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 89
reconcile them with an established Order. T he four pro-
gressive changes that we have just seen - transition from the
family to the circle of contacts, substitution of statute for
contract, discovery of a specificall y psychoanalytic order, a
pact with linguistics- mark this ambition to take part in the
regulation of assemblages of desire and of enunciation, or even
to stake out a dominant position in this regulation.
We have been credited with many blunders about the
Anti-Oedipus, about desiring machines, about what an
assemblage of desire is, the forces that it mobilizes, the
dangers it confronts. T hey did not come from us. We said that
desire is in no sense connected to the ' Law' and cannot be
defined by any fundamental lack. For that's the real idea of
the priest: the constituent law at the heart of desire, desire
constituted as lack, the holy castration, the split subject, the
deat h drive, the strange culture of death. And it is doubtless
like this each time that desire is conceived as a bridge between
a subject and an object: the subj ect of desire cannot but be
split, and the object lost in advance. What we tried to show,
on the contrary, was how desire was beyond these person-
ological or obj ectaJ CQ-ordina tes. It seemed to us that desire
was a process and that it unrolled a plane of consistence, a fi eld of
immanence, a 'body without organs', as Artaud put it, criss-
crossed by particles and fluxes which break free from objects
and subjects ... Desire is therefore not internal to a subject,
any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictl y imman-
ent to a plane which it does not pre-exist, to a plane which
must be constructed, where particles are emitted and fluxes
combine. There is only desire in so far as there is deployment
of a particular fi eld, propagation of particular fluxes, emission
of particular particles. Far from presupposing a subject, desire
cannot be attained except at the point where someone is
deprived of the power of saying '1' . Far from directing itself
towards an obj ect, desire can only be reached at the point
where someone no longer searches for or gr asps an obj ect any
more than he grasps himself as subject. The obj ection is then
90 Dialogues
made that such a desire is totally indeterminate, and that it is
even more imbued with lack. But who has you believe that by
losing the co-ordinates of object and subject you lack some-
thing? Who is pushing you into believing that indefinite
articles a nd pronouns (a, one), third persons (he, she) and
verbs in the infinitive are in the least indeterminate? The
plane of or of immanence, the body without
organs, includes voids and deserts. But these are ' fully' part of
desire, far from accentuating some kind of lack in it. What a
strange confusion - that of void with lack. We really do lack in
general a particle of the East, a grai n of Zen. Anorexia is
perhaps the thing about which most wrong has been spoken-
particularl y under the influence of psychoanalysis. The void
which is specific to the anorexic body without organs has
nothing to do with a lack, and is part of the constitution of the
field of desire criss-crossed by particles and fluxes. We will
shortly return to this example to give more detail. But already
the desert is a body without organs which has never been
hostile to the groups who people it; the void has never been
hostile to the particles which move about in it.
We have an image of the desert which involves the thirsty
explorer, and an image of the void, as a ground which opens
up. Images related to death which are onl y validwhere the
plane of consistence, which is identical to desire, is unable to
establish itself and does not have the conditions to build on.
But, on the plane of consistence, even the scarcity of particles'
and the slowing down and drying up of fl uxes are part of
desi re, and of the pure life of desire, without indicating any
lack. As Lawrence says, chastity is a flux. Is the plane of
consistence something very strange? We would have to say
si multaneously not only: ' You've got it already, you do not
feel desire without its being already there, without its being
mapped out at the same time as your desire', but also: ' You
haven't got it, and you don' t desire it if you can' t manage to
construct it, if you don' t know how to, by finding your places,
your assemblages, your particles and your fluxes.' We would
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 91
have to say simultaneously not only: ' It is created all alone,
but know how to see it', and also: ' You have to create it, know
how to create it, take the right directions, at your risk and
peri l. ' Desi re: who, except priests, would want to call it ' lack' ?
Nietzsche called it 'Will to Power' . There are other names for
it. For example, 'grace'. Desiring is not at all easy, but this is
precisely because it gives, instead of lacks, 'virtue which
gives'. T hose who link desire to lack, the long column. of
crooners of castration, clearly indicate a long resentment, hke
an interminable bad conscience. Is this to misunderstand the
misery of those who really do lack something? But apart from
the fact th.at psychoanalysis does not talk about these people
(on the contrary, it makes the distinction, it says pompously
enough that it is not concerned with real privations), those
whose lack is real have no possible plane of consistence which
would allow them to desire. They are prevented from doing
this in a thousand ways. And as soon as they construct one,
they lack nothing on this plane, and from this starting-point
they set off victoriously towards that which they lack outside.
Lack refers to a positivity of desire, and not the desire to a
negativity of lack. Even individually, the construction of the
plane is a politics, it necessarily involves a 'collective', col-
lective assemblages, a set of social becomings.
We should distinguish between two planes, two types of
planes. On the one hand, a plane that could be called one of
'organization. I t concerns both the development of forms and
the formation of subjects. It is therefore, as much as one
wishes, structural and genetic. In any case, it possesses a
supplementary dimension, one dimension more, a hidden di-
mension, since it is not given for itself, but must always be
concluded, inferred, induced on the basis of what it organizes.
It is like in music where the principle of composition is not
given in a directl y perceptible, audible, relation with it
provides. I t is therefore a plane of transcendence, a kmd of
design, in the mind of man or in the mind of a god, w.hen
it is accorded a maximum of immanence by plungmg It mto
92 Dialogues
the dept hs of Nature, or of the Unconscious. One such plane is
that of the Law, in so far as it organizes and develops forms,
genres, themes, motifs, and assigns and causes the evolution of
subjects, persons, characteristic features and feel ings:
harmony of forms, education of subjects.
And then there is a completely different plane which does
not deal wi th these things: the plane of Consistence. This
other plane knows onl y relations of movement and rest of
)
speed and slowness, between unformed, or relatively un-
formed, elements, molecules or particles borne away by fluxes.
It knows nothing of subjects, but rather what are called
' hecceities'.
9
In fact no individuation takes place in the man-
ner of a subject or even of a thing. An hour, a day, a season, a
cli mate, one or several years- a degree of heat, an intensity,
very different intensities which combine - have a perfect indi-
viduali ty which should not be confused with that of a thing or
of a formed subject. 'What a terrible five o'clock in the after-
n?on!' It is not the moment, and it is not brevity, which
distinguishes this type of individuation. A hecceity can last as
long as, and even longer than, the time required for the
development of a form and the evolution of a subject. But it is
not the same kind of ti me: floating times, the fl oating Ji nes of
Aion as distinct from Chronos. Hecceities are simply degrees
of power which combine, to which correspond a power to
affect and be affected, active or passive affects, intensities. On
her stroll Virginia Woolrs heroine penetrates like a blade
through all things, and yet looks from the outside, with the
impression that it is dangerous to li ve even a single day
('Never again will I say: I am this or that, he is this, he is
that .. .'). But the stroll is itself a hecceity. I t is hecceities that
are being expressed in indefinite, but not indeterminate
I >
articles and pronouns; in proper names which do not des-
ignate people but mark events, in verbs in the infinitive which
are not undifferentiated but constitute becomings or pro-
cesses. It is hecceity which needs this kind of enunciation.
HECCEITY = EVENT. It is a question of life, to live in this
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 93
way, on the basis of such a plane, or rather on such a
' He is as lawless as the wind and very secret about what he does at mght
(Charlotte Bronte). Where does the perfection of
sentence come from? Pierre Chevalier IS moved by
sentence which he discovers and which runs through h1m;
would he be moved ifhe was not himself a hecceity which runs
through the sentence? A thing, an animal, a person are now
only definable by movements and rests, speeds and slownesses
(longitude) and by affects, intensities (latitude) .
10
There are no
more forms but cinematic relations between unformed
elements there are no more subjects but dynamic indi-
without subjects, which constitute collective
assemblages. Nothing develops, but things late or i.n
advance and enter into some assemblage accordmg to the1r
of speed. Nothing becomes but
hecceities take shape according to the compositiOns of non-
subjective powers and effects. Map of speeds and intensities.
We have already encountered this business of speeds and
slownesses: their common quality is to grow from the middle,
to be always-in-between; they have in common the im-
perceptible, like vast slowness of massive J apanese
wrestlers, and all of a sudden, a decisive gesture so swift that
we didn't see it. Speed has no privilege over slowness: both
fray the nerves or rather, train them and give them mastery.
Antoine. Wha; is a young girl or a group of young girls?
Proust describes them as moving relationships of slowness and
speed, and individuations by hecceity which are not sub-
jective. . . .
It is this plane, defined umquely by long1tude and latitude,
which may be opposed to the plane of organization.
a plane of immanence because n? d1mens1on
supplementary to what occurs. on 1.t; Its d.1mens10.ns grow. or
decrease with what occurs on 1t, Without 1ts plamtude bemg
endangered (plane with n dimensions). This .is no longer a
teleological plane, a design, but a geometncal plane,. an
abstract drawing, which is like the section of all the vanous
u
94 Dialogues
whatever their dimensions. Planomenon or
Rh1zosphere, hypersphere. It is like a fi xed plane, but ' fixed '
does not mean motionless; it indicates the absolute state of
movement as well as that of rest, in relation to which all
var.iations in speed themselves become perceptible.
This plane. of. tmman.ence or consistence includes fogs,
votds, JUmps, Immobilizations, suspensions, hastes.
For bemg is a part of the plane itself: we always have
to start agam, start again from the middle, to give the
elements new relations of speed and slowness which make
them change assemblage, jump from one assemblage to
the mul tiplicity of planes on the plane, and
the vo1ds whtch form part of the plane, as a silence forms part
of a plane of sound [plan sonore], without it being possible to
say 's?mething is m_issing'. speaks of'programming the
machme each ume a track 1s replayed, it gives different
charactenstics of tempo' . And C.age speaks of a clock that
would give variable speeds. Some contemporary musicians
have pushed to the limit the practical idea of an immanent
plane whj ch no longer has a hidden principle of organization
but the process must be heard no less than what
out of tt; where forms are only retained to set free variations of
between p.articles or molecules of sound; where themes,
mot1fs and subJects. are only. retai ned to set free fl oating
affects. The extraordmary way m which Boulez deals with the
Wagnerian leitmotif. It would not be enough to oppose the
East and the West here, the plane of imma nence which comes
the East and the plane of transcendent organization
wh1ch was always the disease of the West; for example,
eastern poetry or drawing, the martial arts, which so often
proceed by pure hecceities and grow from the 'middle' . The
West itself is criss-crossed by this immense plane of imman-
ence o: which carries off forms and strips them
of the1r tnd1cat10ns of speed, which dissolve subjects and
extract their hecceities, nothing left but longitudes and
latitudes.
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 95
Plane of consistence, plane of immanence- Spinoza already
conceived the plane in this way in opposition. to the
of order and law, philosophers or theolog1ans. The tnmty
Holderlin-Kleist-Nietzsche already conceived wri ti ng, art
and even a new politics in this way: no longer as a harmonious
development of form and a well-ordered formation of the
subject, as Goethe or Schiller or Hegel wanted, but success-
ions of catatonic states and periods of extreme haste, of
suspensions and shootings, coexistences of variable speeds,
blocs of becoming, leaps across voids, displacements of a
centre of gravity on an line, on a
plane of immanence, a stationary process at speed
which sets free particles and affects. (Two secrets
the eternal return as fi xed plane selecting the always van able
speeds and slownesses of Zarathustra; the not as
wri ting in small pieces, but as assemblage whtch cannot be
read twice which cannot ' replay' without changing the speeds
and between its elements.) It is all that, it is all this
pla ne which has only one name - Desire .- and has
absolutely nothing to do with lack or wtth the law . As
Nietzsche says, who would want to call this law? - the word
has too much of a moral aftertaste.
So we were saying a simple thing: desire concerns speeds
and slownesses between particles (longitude), affects, in-
tensities and hecceities in degrees of power {latitude) . A -
VAMPIRE - TO SLEEP - OA Y - AND - TO WAKE UP-
NIGHT. Do you realize how simple a desire is? Sleeping is a
desire. Walking is a desire. Listening to music, or making
music or writing, are desires. A spring, a winter, are desires.
Old ;ge also is a desire. Even deat h. Desire never needs
interpreting, it is it which experiments. Then we run up
against very exasperating objections. They say to us we
are returning to an old cult of pleasure, to a pleasure pnnctple,
or to a notion of the festival {the revolution will be a
festival ... ). By way of obj ection they hold up those who are
stopped from sleeping, whether for internal or external
96 Dialogues
reasons, and who have neither tbe means nor the time for a
festival; or who have neither the time nor the culture to listen
to music; nor the ability to walk, nor to go into a catatonic
state except in hospital; or who are suddenl y struck by a
horrible old age or death, in short all those who sutTer: don' t
they 'lack' something? And above all, it is obj ected that by
releasing desire from lack and law, the only thing we have left
to refer to is a state of nature, a desire which would be natural
and spontaneous reality. We say quite the opposite: desire only
exists when assembled or machined. You cannot grasp or conceive
of a desir e outside a determinate assemblage, on a plane
whkh is not pre-existent but which must itself be constructed.
All that is important is that each group or individual should
construct the plane of immanence on which they lead their life
and carry on their business. Without these conditions you
obviously do lack something, but you lack precisely the condi-
tions which make a desire possible. Organizations of forms,
formations of subjects (the other plane), ' incapacitate' desire:
they subjugate it to law and introduce lack into it. If you tie
someone up and say to him 'Express yourself, friend', the most
he will be able to say is that he doesn't want to be tied up. The
onl y spontaneity in desire is doubtless of that kind: to not
want to be oppressed, exploited, enslaved, subjugated. But no
desire has ever been created with non-wishes. Not to want to
be enslaved is a non-proposition. In retrospect every
assemblage expresses and creates a desire by constructing the
plane which makes it possible and, by making it possible,
brings it about. Desire is not restricted to the privileged;
neither is it restricted to the success of a revolution once it
occurred. I t is in itself an immanent revolutionary process. It
is constroctivist, not at all spontaneist. Since every assemblage is
collec6ve, is itself a collective, it is indeed true that every
desire is the alTair of the people, or an alTair of the masses, a
molecular affair.
We don' t even believe in internal drives which would
prompt desire. The plane of immanence has nothing to do
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 97
. . . ' ke the Outside where all desires come
wi th an interionty; tt ts h 'd as the supposed death
from. When we hear of a thing as shtuptr t e Eros and Thanatos.
. . 'k . a shadow t ea ,
drive, tt IS h e seemg h b n assemblage so warped, so
We have to ask: could t ere e a I' death' would be an
ce ' Long tve .
hideous, that the . If be desired in it? Or isn' t thts
act ual part of it and dcat b;tse its downfall, its failure? We
the opposite of an assem h' ch such a desire becomes
must describe the assemblagde ml w I 'tself But never will we
ving and ec ares 1 .
possible, mo . h would refer to structural invanants? or
P
oint to dnves whtc 1 . 1 etc . we ask each time
. bl 0 al ana gemta, .. .
to genetic vana es. r , , nts enter not to whtch
. blages these compone ' .
into whtch assem h' h memories or fixatiOns
d nor tow tC r
drives they correspon , h'ch incidents they re.er,
. . tance nor to w t
they owe . ,I ments they combine to a
but with whtch extrmstc e_ e. I d the case with chddren
d Thts tS a rea Y
desire, to create estre.. . h the outside with the conquest
who fabricate their destre wtt 1 by transcendent
'd t . n interna stages h
of the outst e, no I' I Hans there is the street, t e
0
ce agam ttt e . If th
structures. n . Professor Freud himse , e
'b s the parents, .
horse, the omm u , . h . . h r an organ nor a function,
' has a pee' [fait-pipi]_ whtc IS carts of the machine. There
but a machine funcuon, one fli o p d hecceities a horse a day
d 1 ses a ects an . .
are speeds an s ownes { d'fferent politics of assemblages,
the street. There y I thing is political. There
. h'ld . m thts sense every
even wtth c J ren. h diagrams or planes, not
mes or rat er . d
are onl y pwgram ' There are onl y becommgs an
even phantasms. li bl cs
memones or ft" . 'nt'ty ofamma ty,
0 . od bl blocs o .emmt , .
blocs, chtldho ocs, h' of the memorial, the tm-
b and not mg h
of present ecommg, . . o more symbolic t an
b lie Destre tS n f
agi nary or the sym ? fi d than signifier: it is made up o
figurative, no stgm te articulate or impede each other
different lines whtch cross, . I assemblage on a plane of
. h 't te a parucu ar . th
and whtc consu u . d not pre-extst ese
B he plane oes . h
immanence. ut t . . these abstract lines whtc
h' h compnse It, . d
assemblages w tc II . Jane of Nature, m or er to
. t We can always ca It p map tt ou.
98 Dialogues
its immanence. But the natur1-artifice distinction
IS not at aJJ relevant here. There is no desire which does not
result in the coexistence of several levels, some of which can be
called natural in contrast to others; but this is a nature which
must be constructed with all the fabrications of the plane of
immanence. The assemblage of feudalisrry includes among its
elements ' horse-stirrup-lance'. The natural position of the
knight, the natural way of holding the lance, depends on a
new symbiosis of man-animal which makes the stirrup the
most natural thing in the world and the horse the most
artificial one. The figures of desire do not derive from this, but
were already mapping out the assemblage, the set of elements,
retained or created by the assemblage, the Lady no less than
the horse, the sleeping knight no less than the wandering
quest for the Grail.
We say that there is assemblage of desire each time that
there are produced, in a field of immanence, or on a plane of
consistence, continuums of intensities, combinations of fluxes,
emissions of particles at variable speeds. Guattari speaks of a
Schumann-assemblage. What is a musical assemblage like
this, designated by a proper name? What are the dimensions
of such an assemblage? There is the relationship with Clara,
woman-child-virtuoso, the Clara lin.e. There is the little
manual machine that Schumann puts together to hold the
middle finger tight and secure the independence of the fourth
finger. There is the ritornello, the little ritornellos which haunt
Schumann and run through all his work like so many child-
hood blocs, a whole concerted enterprise of involution, res-
traint and exhaustion of the theme and form. And there is also
the use of the piano, this movement of deterri toriali zation
which carries away the ritornello ('wings have sprouted on the
child') on a melodic line, in an original polyphonic
assemblage capable of producing dynamic and affective rela-
tions of speed or slowness, of delay or anticipation which are
very complex, on the basis of an intrinsically simple or
simplified form. There is the intermezzo, or rat her there is
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 99
h
. g but intermezzi in Schumann, making the music pass
not tn r d
th middle preventing the sound plane from topp mg un er a
::w :f organization or development.'' All is
. the constitutive assemblage of desire. It IS desire Itself
10
h h passes and moves. There is no need to be Schumann.
W IC . h h t
Listen to Schumann. Conversely, there tS w at appens_ o
make the whole assemblage waver: the li ttle manual
leads to paralysis of the finger, and s
d b
ng We simply say that des1re IS mseparable rna - ecom1 ...
from a plane of consistence which must be every
piece by piece and from assemblages on this plane,
umeu ms combinations emissions. Without lack, but de-
con nuu , ' . . F'lix
finitely not without risk or penl. Des1re,. says e a
r ella But this is already very comphcated: for the
nmn . . .
t rnello is a kind of sound territoriality, the chtld reassurmg
he is afraid in the baby on the
_ , 12 (Psychoanalysis senously misunderstood the
tree top . . . . . f
famous ' Fort-Da' when it saw m 1t an oppos1t1on o __ a
h logical kind instead of recognizing a ritornello. ) But 1t IS
p ono . h" h k
also the whole movement of deterritorializat1on w 1c es
hold of a form and a subject to extract from them vanable
speeds and floating affects; then the music begins.
counts in desire is not the false alternative
nature-artifice; it is the respective play of re-
territorializations and movements of deterntonahzat10n.
In of desire we were no of
and its festivals. Certainly pleasure IS agreeable, certamly ':"e
move towards it with all our might. But in its ':"ost
and indispensable forms, it comes rather as an m
the process of desire as constitution of a of Immanence.
There is nothing more revealing than the 1dea of a
discha rge once pleasure is attained, one would have a httle
calm desire is rekindled: there is a lot ofhatre?, fear,
f d the cult of pleasure. Pleasure is the attnbut1on of
o estre, m . . . h 1
the affect the affection for a person or subject, 1t 1s t e on Y
means fo; a person to ' find himself again' in the process of
tOO Dialogues
desire which overwhelms him. Pleasures, even the most
artificial, or the dizziest, can onl y be reterritorialization. Des-
ire does not have pleasure as its norm, but this is not in the
name of an internal Lack which could not be filled, but on the
contrary by virtue of its positivity; that is, of the plane of
consistence that it traces in the course of its process. It is the
same error whjch relates desire to the Law of the lack and to
the Norm of pleasure. It is when you keep relating desire to
pleasure, to the attainment of pleasure, that you also notice
that something fundamental is missing. To the point where, to
break these preformed alliances between desire-pleasure-lack,
we are obliged to make detours through bizarre fabrications,
with much ambiguity. Take, as an example, courtly love,
which is an assemblage of desire connected to feudalism as
end. Dating an assemblage is not doing history, it is giving the
assemblage its co-ordinates of expression and content, proper
names, infinitive-becomings, articles, hecceities. (So that's
what doing history is?) Now, it is well known that courtl y love
implies tests which postpone pleasure, or at least postpone the
ending of coitus. This is certainly not a method of deprivation.
It is the constitution of a field of immanence, where desire
constructs its own plane and lacks nothing, any more than it
allows itself to be interrupted by a discharge which would
indicate that it is too heavy for it to bear. Courtly love has two
enemies which merge into one: a religious transcendence of
lack and a hedonistic interruption which introduces pleasure
as discharge. It is the immanent process of desire which fills
itself up, the continuum of intensities, the combination of
fluxes, which replace both the law-authority and the pleasure-
interruption. The process of desire is called 'joy', not lack or
demand. Everything is permjtted, except what would come
and break up the integral process of desire, the assemblage.
This is not something to do with Nature: on the contrary, it
requires a great deal of artifice to exorcise the internal lack,
the higher transcendent element and the apparent exterior.
Ascesis, why not? Ascesis has always been the condition of
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 101
h'b' . You will always find . . )' . g or pro I mon. '
desire, not its mm . N w it has been ' historically
an ascesis if you thmk. should be possible
necessary that a certam le . Jar place Chivalrous Jove
. 1 ment at a parucu . h d
at a parucu ar ' ossible until the two fluxes a
P
roperl y speakmg was nflot p d the erotic flux, in the sense
. d h arrior ux an d
combine ' t e w h I But courtl y love reqmre a
the rig t to ove. 1 t
that valour gave . h 1 r became itself mtema o
new demarcatioo in whlc dvahou t 13 One can say as much,
1 Jude t e tes .
Jove, and ove masochist assemblage: the organ-
in other condiUons, o ffi . . it appear less as a
. f h iliations and su ermg m dl
izauon o urn . . n uish and so attaining a suppose y
means of exorcizing a g d e a particularly con-
I than as a proce ur ' 1
forbidden p easure, . b d 'thout organs and deve op
constitute a o Y WI h
one, to f desire which pleasure, on t e con-
a contmuous process o.
trary' would sexuality has the role of an
We do not beheve m genebl f desire nor that it con-
. th assem ages o ' f
infrastructure m e ca able of transformation or o
stitutes an energy . P . S ality can only be thought
. . d subhmauon. exu . 'th
neutrahzauon an ng into conjuncuon W1
fl ng others enten .
of as one ux amo . 't h' h themselves enter mto
. . g paruc es w IC . . . f
other fluxes, emltUn. d d slowness in the mamry o
particular relationships of spee anbl can be characterized
les No assem age
certain other . What a depressing idea of love, to
by one flux exclusively. I hose monotony must
make it a relation t:o ; tra people. And it is
be vanquished as aside people altogether by
not improved the Idea o the construction of perverse or
bringing sexuahty. enclose sexuality in a theatre .of
sadistic little machmes .
1
s given off by all th1s,
th' ng dirty or sta e I . .
phantasms: some
1
.
1
. any case too narCISSIS-
h. h . too senumenta m ' '
something w IC IS .
1
e around itself and grow
. h 0 begms to revo v h b
lie, as w en a ux ' d . . g machines' oug t to e
S F ' I' fine phrase esmn
1
.
stale. o e IX s Th stion about sexua lty IS:
h asons e que d
given up for t ese re . . ter to form such an
into the vicini ty of what else does It en
1 02 Dialogues
such a hecceity, particular relations of movement and rest?
The more it is articulated with other fluxes, the more it wiU
remain sexuality, pure and simple sexuality, far from aU
idealizing sublimation. I t will be all the more sexuality for
itself, inventive, amazed, with neither phantasm which turns
round and round nor idealization which leaps into the air: the
masturbator is the only one who makes phantasms.
is exactly a masturbation, a generali zed, orga-
nized and coded narcissism. Sexuality does not aUow itself to
be sublimated, or phantasmed, because its concern is
elsewhere, in the real vicinity of and in real combination with
other fluxes, which exhaust or precipitate it - all depends on
the moment and the assemblage. And it is not simpl y from one
to the other of the two 'subjects' that this vicinity or com-
bination takes place; it is in each of the two that several fluxes
combine to form a bloc of becoming which makes demands on
them both, music-becoming of Clara, woman- or
child-becoming of Schumann. Not the man and woman as
sexual entities, caught in a binary apparatus, but a molecular
becoming, birth of a molecular woman in music, birth of
molecular sonority in a woman. 'The relations between the
two spouses profoundly change over the years, often without
them realizing anything; whiJe each change is a cause of
suffering, even if it causes a certain joy ... With each change
a new being appears, a new rhythm is established ... Sex is a
changing thing, sometimes lively, sometimes resting,
sometimes inflamed and sometimes dead. ' 14 At each moment
we are made up of lines which are variable at each instant
may be combined in different ways, packets of lines:
longitudes and latitudes, tropics and meridians, etc. There are
no mono-fluxes. The analysis of the unconscious should be a
geography rather than a history. Which Jines appear blocked
. ,
monbund, closed in, dead-ended, falling into a black hole or
exhausted, which others are active or lively, which allow
something to escape and draw us along? Little Hans again:
how was the line of the building and of the neighbours cut off
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 103
Oedi al tree developed, what rple did
from him; how was the . p (f lay why did the child seek
Professor Freud's branchmgbe-o p . , etc? Psychoanalysis has
h l. fa horse- commg, ld
refuge on t e me o . d f: "l"al pathways we shou not
ed ental an ami I ' . (f
always haunt n a articular way of branching o
reproach it for. haVtng choseh .P de a dead end out of this
h r but for avmg ma hi h
rather than anot e , d. . of enunciation w c
h nvented con ltlons
one, for aVtng 1 ances that it nevertheless gave
. d nee the new utter
crushed m a va h t of being able to say: your
rise to. We should get to t e everything is fine, even
father your mother, your gran m . fi , firom the moment that
' f: h ery entry 1s me
the Name of at s choanalysis has produced every-
there are muluple exits. h p y h lead us anywhere at all,
ts ' Anyw ere t e rc.u ' kn
thing- except ex.t . ffi h t rail line we don't ow
if e to an old o s oo t
and we com h ll we'll just take it, go down tt, o
anything about, what the e , b God we'll boat down the
And some year, Y '
see where tt goes. ed d that Enough to last us a
. always want to o . all 15
Miss1ss1pp1, . h
1 1
want to take to do 1t
lifetime. And that's JUSt ow ong
II
. f d ire are relating it to: lack or
The three misunderstandmgs o pleasure or, above all, the
ral po
ntaneous re 1 f
law; a natu or s bl d d f:abricated on a p ane o
. . al s assem e an ,
festival. Destre IS way . . h" h ust itself be constructed at
f positiOn W IC m
immanence or o com . bl d fabricates. We do not
the same rime as determined. Historical
simply mean that destre IS hlsto 1 . ytance to play the role of
. 1 es a structura ms .
determination mvo v of which desire is born. But desire IS
law or of cause, as a result h .I "th the variables of an
' . eac ttme w .
the real agent, mergmg . . hl.ch leads to destre: one
1 k or pnvatton w .
assemblage. It IS not ac blage from which one ts
. 1 rion to an assem .
only feels lack m rea . It of an assemblage m
I desires as a resu
excluded, but one on y "f th" were an association for
which one is included (even 1 IS
banditry or revolt).
I 04 Dialogues
Machine m h . .
' ac mtsm ' mach. . ' .
mechanical or organic. ' Mecham.Ic: .this does not mean either
closer connections between d IS a system of closer and
COntrast is a ' proximi ty' . ent terms. The machine b
heterogeneou.s terms
pendent of distance o . gt. proximity IS itself . d
b
r contJgu1ty) Wh m e-
assem lage is t he sh n f . at defines a m h.
line. As in Kl . ' I o a centre of gravity al ac me
eist s marionette . . h' ong an abst ract
. to actual lines or move I' It IS t IS shift which gives .
1
h' ments t may b . nse
t . IS sense, points to the f e Said .that the machine
,. IS IS wrong: the machine o o .a machme operator. Bu:
m the centre of gravi ty' perator IS present in the machine
through him Th . ' or rather of speed h' h '
. at IS why it is ' w IC goes
:ovements are impossible for the to say that certain
are the movements such ac. me- on the contra
of Its parts is a man. Take th a makes because
:e of its moving parts: one that has a dancer for
make some movement that say that. the machine
. g, but on the contrary th . man IS capa ble of
except as part o;: man Incapable of making
; IC com.es from the East pres certam machine. A gesture
machme is a proximi an Asiatic machine
t.hmg. I.t is primary in relati: .of
hne which crosses them and k them smce it is the abstract
astride several stru:: es them. work together. It is
structions. The mach . res, as m Tinguely's
. . . me, m req con-
goes beyond th umng th.e heterogeneity of
conditiOns of hom . e structures With their m .
fi . ogeneJty A
1
1n1mum
Irst In relation to the . machine always c
Th . men and antm
1
omes
. e history of technolo h a s It takes into its 'stock'
the variable s ows that a tool is nothin .
certam relationsh' f ... me assemblage which g . g
h lp 0 VICinity h IVeS It a
t e hopli te weapons of th Wit man, animals and thin s
assemblage bur are used . e Greeks predate the ho .
d
. m a qu 't d'ffi P Jte
a fferent tool de d' 1 e 1 erent way the Stl' .
. pen mg on h h . ' rrup IS
nomadic war-mach. w et er It is related
me, or whether o h to a
' n t e cont rary, it has
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 105
been taken up in the context of the feudal machine. It is the
machine that makes the tool and not vice versa. An
evolutionary line going from man to tool, and from tool to
technological machine, is purely imaginary. The machine is
social in its primary sense, and is primary in relation to the
structures it crosses, to the men it makes use of, to the tools it
selects, and to the technologies it promotes .
And it is similar wit h the organism: just as mechanics
presupposes a social machine, the organism in turn supposes a
body without organs, defined by its lines, axes and gradients, a
whole, separate, machine functioning distinct from organic
functions and from mechanical relationships. The intense egg,
not at all maternal, but always contemporary with our organ-
ization, underlyi ng our development. Abstract machines or
bodies without organs - this is desire. There are many kinds,
but they are definable by what occurs on them and in them:
continuums of intensity, blocs of becoming, emissions of
particles, combinations of fluxes.
Now it is these variables (which continuums? which becom-
ings, which particles, which fluxes, which sorts of emission
and combination?) which define ' regimes of signs'. It is not
the regi me which presupposes signs, it is the sign which
presupposes a certain regime. It is, therefore, very doubtful
whether the sign reveals a primacy of signifiance or of the
signifier. It is rat her the signifier which refers to a specific
regime of signs, and probably not the most important or the
most obvious. Semiology can only be a study of regimes, of
thei r differences and their transformations. Sign refers to
nothi ng in particular, except to regimes into which the
variables of desire enter.
Let us take two examples out of the infini ty of possible
regi mes. A centre can be t hought of as an endogenous force,
internal to the machine, which develops by circular
irradiation in all directions, taking everything into its orbit, a
mechanic continually jumping from one point to another, and
from one circle to another. This then is a definition of a regime
I 06 Dialogrus
"':here the 'sign' keeps on referring back to the sign, in each
Circle and :rom one circle to the next, the totality of signs in
refernng back to a mobile signifier or to a centre of
s1gn1fiance; and where interpretation attribution of a
keeps on givi ng back the signifier, as if to recharge
and overcome 1ts entropy. T here will be a group of
mtens1t1es and fl uxes which trace a particular ' map': at the
centre the Despot, or the God, his temple or his house, his
Face as an exposed face seen straight on, black hole on a white
wall; the radiating organization of the circles, with a full
bureaucracy to control the relations and movements from one
circle to. the next (the palace, the street, the village, the
the scrub, the borders); the special role of the
p:1est, who acts as interpreter or seer; the system's line of
fl1ght,_ has to be barred, exorcized and stamped by a
negative s1gn, patrolled by a kind of scapegoat, reverse image
of the despot, whose _role is to take away everything
that threatens or sullies the workmg of the machine. It can be
seen that the line of gravity is, as it were, a mutation, and that
the centre "':hich traverses it, the ' mechanic', keeps jumping
from one pomt to another: from the face of God to the faceless
via the scribes, the priests and the subjects. This is
a reg1me that can be called signifying; but it depends on a
specific regime of signs in so far as it expresses a state of fluxes
and intensities.
. Now ta ke a different regime. We are no longer thinking of a
Simultaneous number of circles in infinite expansion, around a
centre, such that each sign presupposes other signs, and the
t? tality a sigrufier. We are thinking of a little packet of
s1gn_s, a bloc of signs, which lines up along an endless
hne, marking on it a succession of processes, of fin-
Ished segments, each with a beginning and an end. This is a
very different machine. Instead of an endogenous force which
suffuses the whole, there is a decisive external event a relation
with the outside which is expressed as an emotion than
as an Idea, an attempt or an action rather than an act of

Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse l 07
imagination. Instead of a centre of signifiance, there is a point
of subjectivation which provides the starting-point of the line,
and in relation to which a subject of enunciation is con-
stituted, then a subject of utterance, even if this means that
the utterance produces the enunciation again. A very different
mechanism from that by which the signified provided another
sigrufier: this ti me, it is the end of one process which marks the
beginning of another, in linear succession. The linear
segmentarity of succession is substituted for the circular
segmentarity of simultaneity. The face has curiously changed
the way it works: it is no longer the despotic face seen strrught
on it is the authoritarian face, which turns away to put itself
'
in profile. It is even a double turning-away, as Holderlin.said
about Oedipus: the God, become Point of subjectivation,
keeps on turning away from his subject, who also keeps
turning away from his God. The faces line up, turn away and
put themselves in profil e. It is here that treason takes place
of trickery: the signifying regime was an economy of tn ckery,
including the face of the despot, the operations of the scribe
and the interpretations of the seer. llut now the machination
takes the form of a treason: it is by turning myself from God
who t urns from me, that I will accomplish the subjective
mjssion of God, as the di vine mission of my subjectivity. The
prophet, the man of the double turning-away, has replaced
the priest, interpreter or seer. The line of flight has
changed its value: instead of being stamped by the negative
sign which indicates the scapegoat, the line of flight has
assumed the value of the positive sign; it merges with the
gravity or velocity of the machine. But it is no less broken,
segmentarized in a succession of finite processes which, at
each occnrrence, fall into a black hole. This, then, is another
regime of signs, li ke another map-making: subjective regime
or regime of passion, very different from the signifying regime.
If we concentrate on these two for the moment, we wonder
what they refer back to. Well, they refer back to anything, to
periods and conditions that are very different. They can refer
1 08 Dialogues
back to social formations, historical events, but also to
pathological formations, psychological types, works of art, etc.
Without there ever being any scope to reduce them in the
slightest. For example, social formations: we can revive
Robertjaulin's terms, the Hebrew and the Pharaoh. It seems
to us that the Pharaoh belongs to a highly signifying machine,
and to a despotic regime which organizes intensities and
fluxes in the irradiating circular style that we have tried to
define. The Hebrew, in contrast, has lost the Temple, he
throws himself into a line of flight to which he attributes the
greatest positive value; but he segmentarizes this line in a
series of finite authoritarian 'processes'. It is the Ark which is
now j ust a little packet of signs shooting out along a desert-
line, between the land and the waters, instead of being the
Temple, central, immobile and omnipresent in the harmony
of the elements. It is the scapegoat who becomes the most
intense figure - we will be the goat and the lamb, God become
slaughtered animal: ' Let evil come back upon us' - Moses
invokes the process or demand- too oppressive to bear - which
must be redirected and distributed into successive segments,
contract-process that is always precarious. The double, linear
turning-away is imposed as the new figure which connects
God and his prophet Uerome Lindon has demonstrated this
in the case of J onah; it is also what the sign ofCain is; it is also
what the sign of Christ is to be). The Passion, subjectivation.
Then we think of something quite different, in a totall y
different sphere: how, in the nineteenth century, there be-
comes apparent a distinction between two maj or kinds of
delirium. On the one hand, paranoid and interpretative de-
lirium, whose starting-point is an endogenous force like a
centre of signifiance, which radiates out in all directions,
constantly referring one sign back to another, and the totality
of the signs to a central signifier (despot, phallus, castration,
with all the leaps, all the mutations from the castrating Master
to the castrated goat}. On the other hand, a very different
form of delirium, called monomaniac, or passionate and con-
t
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse I 09
cerned with demand: an external occurrence, a point of
subjectivation, which can be anything, a little local packet of
signs, an arc, a blink, a fetish, lingerie, a shoe, a face that turns
away - this point of subjectivation is swallowed up along a
straight line which will be segmentarized in successive pro-
cesses with variable intervals. Delirium of action rather than
idea, say psychiatrists; of emotion rather than imagination;
dependent on a ' postulate' or a concise formula rather than a
germ of development. We have seen how at its
beginning, found itself trapped between these two kmds of
delirium: this was not a matter of symptomatology, but a
whole new body of material arrived from both sides or was
found to be available at that moment, overflowing the system
of what was, until then, called ' madness' . A person suffering
from a passionate or subjective delirium starts a process,
indicated by a point of subjectivation: ' He loves me', ' he' gave
me a sign; I constitute myself as a subject of
of pride. high intensity); I fall back to the of
of uttera nces ('He is cheating me', ' He's a tra1tor' , low m-
tensity). And then a second 'process' begins, as the passionate
person lodges himself in the line of Oight which goes. from
black hole to black hole. Tristan and Isolde follow the line of
passion of the boat which takes them away: Tristan, Isolde,
Isolde, Tristan ... There is here a type of redundancy, pas-
sionate or subjective, the redundancy of resonance, very di.fferentfrum
the redundancy of signifying or of frequency.
Our d istinctions are undoubtedly too hasty. We ought to
take each specific case and search in it for its specifi c machine,
or ' body without organs'; and then find out what
particles or fluxes, what regime of signs. If IS not
a mechanism, and if the body is not an orgamsm, 1t IS always
then that desire assembles. But it is not in the same way as a
masochist assembles, or a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or an
anorexic, etc. Homage to Fanny: the case of anorexia. It is a
question of food fluxes, but combined with other fluxes,
clothes fluxes, for example (specifically anorexic elegance,
II 0 Dialogues
Fanny's trinity: Virginia Woolf, Murnau, Kay Kendall ). The
anorexic consists of a body without organs with voids and
fullnesses. The alternation of stuffing and emptying: anorexic
feasts, the imbibings of fizzy drinks. We should not even talk
about alternation: void and fullness are like two demarcations
of intensity; the point is always to float in one's own body. It is
not a matter of a refusal of the body, it is a matter of a refusal
of the organism, of a refusal of what the organism makes the
body undergo. Not regression at all, but involution, involuted
body. The anorexic void has nothing to do with a lack, it is on
the contrary a way of escaping the organic constraint of lack
and hunger at the mechanical mealtime. There is a whole
plane of construction of the anorexic, making oneself an
anorganic body (which does not mean asexual: on the con-
trary, woman-becoming of every anorexic). Anorexia is a
political system, a micro-politics: to escape from the norms of
consumption in order not to be an object of consumption
oneself. It is a feminine protest, from a woman who wants to
have a functioning of the body and not simply organic and
social functions which make her dependent. She will turn
consumption against itself: she will often be a model - she will
often be a cook, a peripatetic cook, who will make something
for others to eat, or else she will like being at the table either
without eating, or else multiplying the absorption of little
things, of little substances. Cook-model, a mixture that can
only exist in this assemblage, this system, and which will be
dissolved in different ones. Her goal is to wrest particles from
food, minute particles with which she will be able to create her
void as well as her fullness, depending on whether she gives
them out or receives them. Anorexics are enthusiasts: they live
treason or the double turning-away in several ways. They
betray hunger, because hunger tricks them by making them
subj ect to the organism; they betray the famil)'l because the
family betrays them by subjecting them to the family meal
and a whole family politics of consumption {to put in its place
an uninterrupted consumption, but one lhat is neutralized,
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse Ill
sanitized); finally they betray food, because food is tre-
acherous by nature {the anorexic thinks that food is full of
grubs and poisons, worms and bacteria, fundamentally bad,
hence the need to select and extract particles from it, or to spit
it back out). ' I' m starvi ng,' she says, grabbing two 'slimming
yoghurts'. Trick-the-hunger, trick-the-family, trick-the-food.
In short, anorexia is a history of politics: to be the involuted of
the organism, the family or the consumer society. There is
politics as soon as there is a continuum of intensities (anor_exic
void and fullness), emission and conquest of food parucles
(constitution of a body without organs, in opposition to a
dietary or organic regime), and above all combination of
fluxes {the food flux enters into relation with a clothes flux, a
flux of language, a flux of sexuality: a whole, molecular
woman-becoming in the anorexic, whether man or woman). It
is what we call a regime of signs. Above all, it is not a matter of
partial objects. It is true that psychiatry and psychoanalysis
do not understand, because they bring everything down to the
level of a neuro-organic or symbolic code (' lack, lack .. .'). So
the second question arises: why does the anorexic assemblage
come so close to going off the rails, to becoming lethal? What
are the dangers it constantly skirts and the dangers into which
it falls? This is a question that must be taken up by a method
other than psychoanalysis: we must try to find out what
dangers arise in the middle of a real experiment, and not the lack
dominating a pre-established interpretation. People are
always in the middle of some business, where nothing may be
designated as its origin. Always things encountering each
other, never things diminishing each other's contribution. A
cartography and never a symbolics.
We thought that this digression on anorexia should make
things clearer. Perhaps, on the other hand, we should not
multiply examples, because there are an infinite number of
them pointing in different directions. Anorexia will assume
increasing importance as a result. In the first place, we should
distinguish in a regime of signs the abstract machine which defines
112 Dialogues
it, and the actual assemblages into which it enters: thus the machine
o: subjectivation, and the assemblages which realize it, in the
htstory of the Hebrews; but equally in the course of passionate
delirium, in the construction of a work, etc. Between these
assemblages, which operate in very different circumstances,
and at very different periods, there will be no causal de-
pendence, but mutual branchings, ' proximi ties' independent
distance or of spatio-temporal proximity. The same plane
wtll be taken up and taken up agai n at very different levels,
depending on whether things happen on ' my' body, on a
social body, a geographical body (but my body is also a
geography, or a people, or peoples). Not that each person
a fragment of universal history; but we are always
Ill a zone of intensity or flux, which is common to our en-
terprise, to a very remote global enterprise, to very distant
geographical environments. Hence a secret of delirium: it
haunts cer tain regions of history which are not arbitrarily
chosen; delirium is not personal or a family matter, it is
world-historical {' I am a beast, a Negro ... I dreamt of
crusades, expeditions of discovery that are completely foreign
to us, republics without histories, stifled religious wars, re-
volution of customs, shifts of races and of continents' ). And
areas of history haunt deliriums and works, without it being
possible to establish causal or symbolic connections. T here
may be a desert of the hypochondriac body, a steppe of the
anorexic body, a capital of the paranoid body: these are not
metaphors between societies and organisms, but collectives
without organs which are realized in a people, a society, a set
of surroundings or an 'ego' . The same abstract machine in
very different assemblages. History is constantly being re-
made, but conversely it is constantl y being made by each of
us, on his own body. Which famous person would you like to
have been, a t what period would you like to have lived? And if
you were a plant, or 3: landscape? But you are all this already,
your mistake is simply in the answers. You are always an
assemblage for an a bstract machine, which is realized
.
-:
;
..
-" -
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 11 3
elsewhere in other assemblages. You are always in the middle
of something; plant, animal or landscape. We kn?w our rela-
tives and associates, never our neighbours who mtght be from
another planet, who always are from another planet. Only
neighbours matter. History is an i_ntroducti_on to de_lirium, but
reciprocally delirium is the onl y mtroductton to history ..
In the second place, there are an infinite number of regimes
of signs. We have looked at two, liO:Uted _ones:. a
Signifying Regime, which is said to be reahzed
despotic assemblage, and also, under other c?nd_JtJOns, u:' an
interpretative paranoid assemblage; a Subjecuve
which is said to be reali zed in a contractual authon tan an
assemblage, and also in a passionate (passionnel] or demanding
monomaniac assemblage. But there are so many others, both
at t he level of abstract machines and of their assemblages.
Anorexia itself sketched out another regime which we reduced
to this schema only for convenience. The regimes of signs are
innumerable: multiple semiotics of ' primitive peoples', semi-
otics of nomads (and those of the desert are not the same as
those of the steppe; and the journey of the Hebrews is some-
thing different again), the semiotics of sedentary peoples (and
how many combinations of the sedentary, of
nomad there are). Signifiance and the stgmfier enJOY no
We should simultaneously study all the regime_s of
pure signs, from the point of view of the abstract machmes
they put into play, and also all the concrete assemblages, from
the point of view of the mixtures they out. _A concrete
semiotics is a mix, a mixture of several regtmes of stgns. Every
concrete semiotics is of the little Negro or of the J avanese type.
The Hebrews straddle a nomadic semiotics, which they pro-
foundly transform, and an semiotics, they
dream of restoring on new foundauons by reconstructmg the
Temple. There is no pure of in a
paranoiac element is always combmed wtth tt (Clerambault,
the psychiat rist who distinguished most the
two types of delirium, underlined at the same ume thetr mtxed

114 Dialogues
nature) . If we consider a detail, like the face-function in
semiotics of painting, we see clearl y how the mixtures are
created: J ean Paris showed that the Byzantine imperial face,
seen straight on, left depth outside the picture, between the
picture and the viewer; whilst the quattrocento integrated
depth by providing the face wi th a degree of profile or even of
turning away; but a picture like Ouccio's Appeal to Tiberius
creates a mix whereby one of the disciples still exemplifies the
Byzantine face while the other enters into a specifically pas-
sionate [passionnel] relation with the Christ figure.
16
What can
be said about huge assemblages like 'capitalism' or
'socialism'? The economy of each one and its financing put
into play very varied types of regimes of signs and abstract
machines. For its part, psychoanalysis is incapable of
analysing regimes of signs because it is itself a mix which
operates simultaneously by signifiance and subjectivation,
without noticing the composite nature of its approach (its
operations proceed through infinite despotic signifiance, while
its organizations are passionate [passionnel] , initiating an un-
limited series of linear processes where at each instance the
psychoanalyst - whether the same or a new one - plays the
role of ' point of subjectivation', with the turning-away of
faces: psychoanalysis is doubly interminable). A general semi-
otic regime should therefore have a first component which is
generative; but it would simply be a matter of showing how an
actual assemblage brings into play several regimes of pure
signs or several abstract machines, putting them into play in
one anot her's mechanisms. A second component would be
transformational; but now it would be a question of showing
how one pure regime of signs can be translated into another,
with what transformations, what unassimilable residues, what
variations and innovations. This second point of view would
be more profound, since it would show, not now simply how
semiotics mix, but how new semiotics are detached and pro-
duced, and how abstract machines are themselves capable of
mutations, inspiring new assemblages.
Dead Psychoanarysis: Anaryse 11 5
In the third place, a regime of signs is never to be confused
with either language or a language-system. One can still
determine abstract organic functions which presuppose
language (information, expression, signification, enactment,
etc.). One can even, in the manner ofSaussure and even more
ofChomsky, think of an abstract machine which presupposes
no knowledge of a language: homogeneity and invariance are
postulated, whether the invariants are conceived as structural
or 'genetic' (hereditary programming). Such a machine can
integrate specifically syntactic or even semantic regimes; it
will push aside the very varied variables and assemblages
which influence a single language into a sort of depository
labelled ' pragmatics'. We will not fault such a machine for
being abstract, but on the contrary, for not being abstract
enough. For it is not the organic functions oflanguage, nor an
'organon' of a language-system, that determine the regimes of
signs. On the contrary, it is the regimes of signs (pragmatics)
that fix the collective assemblages of enunciation in a
language as flux of expression, at the same time as the
machine assemblages of desire are fixed in fluxes of content.
So that a language-system is as much a heterogeneous flux in
itself as in a relationship of reciprocal presupposition with
fluxes t hat are heterogeneous both in regard to each other and
to the language-system. An abstract machine is never a thing
of language, but shapes very varied combinations, emissions
and continuations of fluxes.
There are no functions oflanguage or of the organ or corpus
of a language-system but rather machinic functionings with
collective assemblages. Literature, 'business of the people' ; why
can the most solitary person, Kafka, say this? Pragmatics is
called to take upon itself the whole of linguistics. What does
Roland Barthes do, in his own evolution in regard to semi-
otics? - he begins with a notion of the 'signifier', to become
more and more ' passionate' [passionnel], then seems to
elaborate a regime that is both open and secret, all the more
collective for being his particular one: behind an apparently
__j
11 6 Dialogues
personal lexical regime, a syntactic network flourishes, and
behind this network a pragmatics of particles and fluxes, like a
car tography which is reversible, capable of modification and
colouring-in, in all sorts of ways. Making a book which would
have to be mentally coloured-in is perhaps what Barthes
found in Loyola; linguistic ascesis. He appears to 'explain
himself; in reali ty he is creating a pragmatics of language.
Felix Gua ttari has written a text on the following linguistic
principles, which take up in their own way some theses of
Weinreich and above all of Labov: (1) it is pragmatics which
is essential because it is the true politics, the micro-politics of
language; (2) there are no universals or invariants of
language, no 'competence' separate from ' performances'; (3)
there is no abstract machine internal to language, only
abstract machines which provide a language with a particular
collective assemblage of enunciation (there is no 'subject' of
enunciation), at the same time as they provide content wi th a
particular machine assemblage of desire (there is no signifier
of desire); (4) there are therefore several languages in a
language, at the same time as there are all sorts of fluxes in the
contents that are sent out, combined and continued. The
point is not ' bilingual', ' multilingual'; the point is that every
language is itself so bilingual, itself so multilingual, that one
can stutter in one's own language, be a foreigner in one's own
language, that is push ever further the points of de-
territorialization of assemblages. A language is criss-crossed
by lines of flight that carry off its vocabulary and syntax. And
abundance of vocabulary and richness of syntax are onl y
means to serve a line whose test of quality is by contrast its
restraint, its conciseness, even its abstraction: an unstressed
involuting line tha t determines the meanders of a phrase or a
text; that inflects every redt:mdancy and bursts figures of style.
It is the pragmatic line, of gravity or velocity, whose ideal
poverty masters the richness of the others.
There are no functions of language, only regimes of signs
which simultaneously combine fluxes of expression and fluxes
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 117
of content, determining assemblages of desire in the latter,
and assemblages of enunciation in the former, each caught up
in the other. Language is never the only flux of expression;
and a flux of expression is never on its own, but always related
to fluxes of content determined by the regime of signs. When
we oonsider language on its own, we are not making a true
abstraction; on the contrary, we are depriving ourselves of the
conditions which would make possible the attribution of an
abstract machine. When we consider a flux of wri ting on its
own, it can only turn circles round itself, falling into a black
hole where the only sound for ever after is the echo of the
question. ' What is writing? What is writing?', without any-
thing ever coming out. What Labov discovers in language to
be immanent variation, irreducible either to the structure or
the development, seems to us to go back to states of com-
bination of fluxes, in content and expression.
17
When a word
assumes a different meaning, or even enters into a different
syntax, we can be sure that it has crossed another flux or that
it has been introduced to a different regime of signs (for
instanoe, the sexual sense that a word from elsewhere can
assume, and vice versa). It is never a matter of metaphor;
there are no metaphors, only combinations. The poetry of
Fran<;ois Vi lion: combination of words with three fluxes, theft,
homosexuali ty, gambling.
18
The extraordinary attempt of
Louis Wolfson, ' the young schizophrenic student of
languages', is difficult to reduce to normal psychoanalytic and
linguistic considera tions: the way he translates his mother
tongue at top speed into a mixt ure of other languages- this way,
not ofleaving his mother tongue, since he retains its sense and
sound, but of putting it to flight and deterritorializing it - is
intimately connected to the anorexic flux of food, to the way
he s natches particles from this flux, combines them at top
speed and combines them with verbal particles snatched from
his mother tongue.
19
Emitting verbal particles which enter the
' proximity' of food particles, etc.
What would identify a pragma tics of language, in relation
_j
118 Dialogues
to its syntactic and semantic aspects, would therefore not be
its relation to the determinations of psychology or of situation,
circumstances or intentions, but rather the fact that it reaches
the extreme of abstraction in the context of machine com-
ponents. It would seem that regimes of signs refer
simultaneously to two systems of co-ordinates. Either the
assemblages that they determine are reduced to a principal
component as organization of power, in a stable order with
dominant meanings (thus despotic signifiance, the passionate
[passionnel] subject of enunciation, etc.); or else they will be
caught in the movement which combines their lines of flight
even further, making them discover new connotations or
directions, constantl y excavating a different language within
the first one. Either the abstract machine will be overcoding -
it will overcode every assemblage with a signifier, with a
subject, etc. - or else it will be mutant, mutational, and will
discover behind every assemblage the point that undoes the
basic organization, making the assemblage shoot off into a
different one. Either everything is related to a plane of organ-
ization and development which is structural or genetic, form or
subject; or everything is launched on a plane of consistence which
only knows differential speeds and hecceities. According to
one regime of co-ordinates, it may still be said that the
American language today contaminates all languages, im-
perialism: but according to the other system of reference, it is
Anglo-American which finds itself contaminated by the most
diverse regimes, Black English, Yellow, Red or White English,
and which is everywhere in flight, New York, city without
language. To take account of these alternatives, we must
introduce a third component which is no longer simply
generative or transformational, but diagrammatic or pragmatic.
We must discover in every regime and every assemblage the
specific val ue of the existing lines of flight: how here they are
stamped with a negative sign; how over there they gain a
positive quality, but are cut up and bartered in successive
processes; how elsewhere they fall into black holes; how
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 119
elsewhere again they enter the service of a war-machi ne; or else
bring a work of art to life. And as they are all this at once, they
make at each moment a diagram, a map of what is blocked,
overcoded, or, on the contrary, mutating, on the route to
liberation, in the process of outlining a particular fragment for a
plane of consistence. Diagrammatism consists in pushing a
language to the plane where ' immanent' variation no longer
depends on a structure or development, but on the combination of
mutating fluxes, on their productions of speed, on their com-
binations of particles (to the point where food particles, sexual
particles, verbal particles, etc., reach their zone of proximity or
indiscernibili ty: abstract machine).
NotebyG.D.
I think this is what I wanted to do when I worked on some writers,
Sacher-Masoch, Proust or Lewis Carroll. What interested me, or
should have interested me, was not the psychoanalysis, or the
psychiatry, or the linguistics, but the regimes of signs of a given
author. This only became clear to us when Felix arrived, and we
did a book on Kafka. My ideal, when I write about an author,
would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is
dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author
you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer
be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him.
Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back
to an aut hor a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and
politics that he knew how to give and invent. So many dead
wri ters must have wept over what has been written about them. I
hope that Kafka was pleased with the book that we did on him,
and it is for that reason that the book pleased nobody.
Criticism and the clinic ought strictly to be identical: but criticism
would be, as it were, the outline of the plane of consistence of a
work, a sieve which would extract the particles emitted or picked
up, the fluxes combined, the becomings in play; the clinic, in
120 Dialogues
accordance with its precise meaning, would be the outline oflines
on this plane or the way in which the lines outline the plane, which
of them are dead-ended or blocked, which cross voids, which
continue, and most importantly the line of steepest gradient, how
it draws in the rest, towards what destination. A clinic without
psychoanalysis or interpretation, a criticism without linguistics or
signifiance. Criticism, art of combinations [conjugaisons] like the
clime, art of declension. It would simply be a matter of knowing
three things.
( 1) The function of t he proper name (the proper name, here, is
precisely not a reference to a particular person as author or
subject of enunciation; it refers to one or several assemblages; the
proper name brings about an individuation by 'hecceity', not at
all by subjectivity). Charlotte Bronte designates a state of the
winds more than a person; Virginia Woolf designates a state of
reigns, ages and sexes. An assemblage may have been in existence
for a long time before it receives its proper name which gives it a
special consistence as if it were thus separated from a more
general regime to assume a kind of autonomy: as in 'sadism',
' masochism'. Why, at a certain moment, does the proper name
isolate an assemblage, why does it make it into a particular regime
of signs, according to a transformational component? Why is
there not also 'Nietzscheism', ' Proustism', ' Kafkaism',
'Spinozism', on the lines of a generalized clinic, that is, a semi-
ology of regimes of signs which is anti-psychiatric,
anti-psychoanalytic, anti-philosophical? And what will an
isolated, named regime of signs become in the clinical current
which carries it away? What is fascinating in medicine is that the
proper name of a doctor can be used to designate a group of
symptoms: Parkinson, Roger ... It is here that the proper name
becomes proper name and finds its function. What has happened
is that the doctor has created a new grouping, a new individuation
of symptoms, a new hecceity, has broken up regimes which have
up to this point been mixed together, has reuruted sequences of
regimes which up to this point were separate.:.1 But what dis-
tinction is there between the doctor and the sick man? It is the sick
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 121
man too who gives his proper name. This is Nietzsche's idea: the
writer and the art ist as doctor-sick man of a civilization. The more
you create your own regime of signs, the less you will be a person
or a subject, the more you will be a 'collective' that meets other
collectives, that combines and interconnects with others,
reactivating, inventing, bringing to the future, bringing about
non-personal individuations.
(2) A regime of signs is no more determined by linguistics than
by psychoanalysis. On the contrary, it is the regime of signs itself
that will determine a particular assemblage of enunciation in the
fluxes of expression and a particular assemblage of desire in the
fluxes of content. And by content we do not just mean what a
writer talks about, his 'subjects', in the double sense of the themes
he deals with and the characters he puts before us, but much more
the states of desire internal and external to the work, and which
are composed along with it, in ' proximity'. Never consider a flux
all on its own; the content-expression distinction is so relative that
a flux of content may even come into the expression, in so far as it
enters into an assemblage of enunciation in relation to other
fluxes. Every assemblage is collective, since it is made up of
several fl uxes which carry along the characters and things, and
which are only to be divided or reassembled as multiplicities. For
example, in Sacher- Masoch the flux of pain and humiliation is
expressed as a contractual assemblage, the contracts of Masoch,
but these contracts are also contents in relation to the expression
of the authoritarian or despotic woman. We have to ask, each
time, what the flux of writing is connected with. Thus the love-
letter as assemblage of enunciation: a love-letter is most im-
portant; we tried to describe and demonstrate how it worked, and
in connection with what, in the case of Kafka- the first task would
be to study the regimes of signs employed by an author, and what
mixtures he uses (generative component). Staying with the two
representative examples that we have picked out, the despotic
signifying regime and the subjective passionate [passionnel] reg-
ime, we can see how they are combined in Kafka- the Castle as
irradiating despotic centre, but also as succession of finite Pro-
122 Dialogues
cesses in a series of contiguous parts. And see how differently they
are combined in Proust: in relation to Chari us, core of a galaxy
whose spirals include utterances and contents; in relation to
Albertine, who passes in contrast through a series of finite linear
processes, processes of sleep, processes of jealousy, processes of
imprisonment. Few authors have been able to match Proust in
bringing into play a multitude of regimes of signs out of which to
compose their work. In addition, each time new regimes are
produced, where what was expression in the earlier ones becomes
content in relation to new forms of expression; a new usage of the
language-system excavates a new language-system in language
(transformational component).
(3) But the essential point, in the end, is the way in which all
these regimes of signs move along a line of gradient, variable with
each author, tracing out a plane of consistence or composition
which characterizes a given work or group of works: not a plane in
the mind, but an immanent real plane, which was not pre-
existent, and which blends all the lines, the intersection of all the
regimes (diagrammatic component): Virginia Woolrs Wave,
Lovecraft's Hypersphere, Proust's Spider's Web, Kleist's Pro-
gramme, Kafka's K-function, the Rhizosphere .. . it is here that
there is no longer any fixed distinction between content and
expression. We no longer know if it is a flux of words or of alcohol,
we are so drunk on pure water, but equally because we are talking
so much with ' materials which are more immediate, more fluid,
more burning than words'. We no longer know ifit is a flux offood
or of words, so much is anorexia a regime of signs, and the signs a
regime of calories\! t (the verbal aggression when someone breaks
the silence too early in the morning; Nietzsche's dietary regime
and that of Proust and Kafka, are also forms of writing, and they
understand it as such; eating- speaking, writing-loving, you will
never catch a flux all on its own). No longer are clements on one
side and syntagms on the other; there are only particles entering
into each other's proximity, on the basis of a plane of immanence.
' I had the idea', says Virginia Woolf, ' that what I wanted to do
now was to saturate each atom.' And here again there are no
'T
Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 123
longer any forms being organized as a result of a structure, or
being developed as a result of a genesis; nor are there any subjects,
persons or characters, which let themselves be attributed, formed
or developed. There are only particles left, particles definable
solely by relationships of movement and rest, speed and slowness,
constructions of differential speeds (and it is not necessarily speed
that wins; it is not necessarily slowness that is the last to get there).
There are now only hecceities left, individuations which are
precise and without subj ect, which are definable solely by affects
or powers (and it is not necessarily the strongest that wins; it is not
the one who is the richest in affects). For us, what is important in
Kafka is precisely the way in which, throughout the regimes of
signs, !he uses or anticipates (capitalism, bureaucracy, fascism,
Stalinism, all the 'satanic powers of the future' ), he puts them in
flight or movement on a plane of consistence that is like the
immanent field of desire, always incomplete, but never lacking, or
legislating, or subjectivating. Literature? But here we have Kafka
putting literature into an immediate relationship with a minority-
machine, a new collective assemblage of enunciation for German
(an assemblage of minorities in the Austrian Empire had already
been Masoch's idea, in a different way). See how Kleist put
li terature into an immediate relationship with a war-machine. In
short, the criticism-clinic should follow the line of steepest
gradient in a work, at the same time as reaching its plane of
consistence. Nathalie Sarraute made a highly important dis-
tinction when she opposed to the organization of forms and the
development of persons and characters this quite different plane
traversed by particles of an unknown material, ' which, like
droplets of mercury, constantly tend to join up and intermingle in
a common mass through the envelopes which separate them':
22
collective assemblage of enunciation, deterritorialized ritomello,
plane of consistence of desire, where the proper name reaches its
highest individuality by losing all personality - imperceptible-
becoming,josephinethechick.
4
Many Politics
I
Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up oflines
and these lines are very varied in nature. The first kind ofline
which forms us is segmentary - of rigid segmentarity (or
rather there are already many lines of this sort): fami ly -
profession; job- holiday; family- and then school - and then
the army - and then the factory - and then retirement. And
each time, from one segment to the next, they speak to us,
saying: ' Now you' re not a baby any more'; and at school,
' You're not at home now'; and in the army, ' You're not at
school now' ... In short, all kinds of clearly defined segments,
in all kinds of directions, which cut us up in all senses, packets
of segmentarized lines. At the same time, we have lines of
segmentarity which are much more supple, as it were
molecular. It's not that they are more intimate or personal -
they run through societies and groups as much as individuals.
They trace out little modifications, they make detours, they
sketch out rises and falls: but they are no less precise for all
this, they even direct irreversible processes. But rather than
molar lines with segments, they are molecular fluxes with
thresholds or quanta. A threshold is crossed, which does not necess-
ariry coincide with a segment of more visible lines. Many things
happen on this second kind of line - becomings,
micro-becomings, which don' t even have the same rhythm as
our ' history'. This is why family histories, registrations, com-
memorations, are so unpleasant, whilst our true changes take
place elsewhere- another politics, another time, another indi-
Many Politics 125
viduation. A profession is a rigid segment, but also what
happens beneath it, the connections, the attractions and re-
pulsions, which do not coincide with the segments, the forms
of madness which are secret but which nevertheless relate to
the public authorities: for example, being a teacher, or a
judge, a barrister, an accountant, a cleaning lady? At the same
time, again, there is a third kind of line, which is even more
strange: as if something carried us away, across our segments,
but also across our thresholds, towards a destination which is
unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent. This line is
simple, abstract, and yet is the most complex of all, the most
tortuous: it is the line of gravity or velocity, the line of flight
and of the greatest gradient (' the line that the centre of gravity
must describe is certainly very simple, and, so he believed,
straight in the majority of cases . .. but, from another point of
view, this line has something exceedingly mysterious. for,
according to him, it is nothing other than the progression of
the soul of the dancer ... .'
1
) This line appears to arise [surgir]
afterwards, to become detached from the two others, if indeed
it succeeds in detaching itself. For perhaps there are people
who do not have this line, who have only the two others, or
who have only one, who live on only one. Nevertheless, in
another sense, this line has always been there, although it is
the opposite of a destiny: it does not have to detach itself from
the others, rather it is the first , t!le others are derived from it.
In any case, the three lines are immanent, caught up in one
another. We have as many tangled lines as a hand. We are
complicated in a different way from a hand. What we call by
different names - schizoanalysis, micro-politics, pragmatics,
diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography - has no other
obj ect than the study of these lines, in groups or as indi-
viduals.
Fitzgerald explains, in a wonderful short story, that a life
always goes at several rhythms, at several speeds.
2
Though
Fitzgerald is a living drama - defining life as a demolition
process - his text is sombre, but no less exemplary for that,
_j
126 Dialogues
each sentence inspiring love. His genius is never so great as
when h-e speaks of his loss of genius. Thus, he says that for him
there were at first great segments - rich-poor, young-old,
success-loss of success, health-sickness, love-love's drying up,
creativity-sterility - which were related to social events
(economic crisis, stock market crash, rise of the cinema which
replaced the novel, formation of fascism, all sorts of things
which could be said to be heterogeneous, but whose segments
respond to and precipitate each other) . Fitzgerald calls these
'cuts' [coupures]; each segment marks or can mark a cut. This
is a type of line, the segmented line, which concerns us all at a
particular time, at a particular place. Whether it heads
towards degradation or success does not alter much (on this
model a successful life is not the best, the American Dream is
as much in the street-sweeper starting out to become a
multimillionaire as in the multimillionaire himself, the
opposite; the same segments). And Fitzgerald says something
else, at the same time: there are lines of crack [filure], which
do not coincide with the lines of great segmentary cuts. This
time we might say that a plate cracks. But it is rather when
everything is going well, or everything goes better on the other
line, that the crack happens on this new line - secret, im-
perceptible, marking a threshold of lowered resistance, or the
rise of a threshold of exigency: you can no longer stand what
you put up with before, even yesterday; the distribution of
desires has changed in us, our relationships of speed and
slowness have been modified, a new type of anxiety comes
upon us, but also a new serenity. Fluxes have moved, it is
when your health is at its best, your riches most assured, your
talent most manifest, that the little cracking which will move
the line obliquely starts to happen. Or the opposite: things go
better for you when everything cracks on the other line, pro-
ducing immense relief. Not being able to bear something any
longer can be a progression, but it can also be an old man's
fear, or the development of a paranoia. It can be a political or
affective appraisal which is perfectly correct. We do not
Many Politics 127
change, we do not age, in the same way - from one line to the
other. Nevertheless, the supple line is not more personal, more
intimate. Micro-cracks are also collective, no less than macro-
cuts are personal. And then, Fitzgerald speaks of yet another
line, a thi rd, which he calls rupture. It might be thought that
nothing has changed, and nevertheless everything has
changed. Certainly it is not the great segments, changes or
even journeys which produce this line; but neither is it the
most secret mutations, the mobile and fluent thresholds,
although these approximate more closely to it. It might be
said rather that an 'absolute' threshold has been reached.
There are no longer secrets. You have become like everyone,
but in fact you have turned the 'everyone' into a becoming. You
have become imperceptible, clandestine. You have undergone
a curious stationary journey. Despite the different tones, it is a
little like the way in which Kierkegaard describes the knight of
the faith, ONLY MOVEMENTS CONCERN ME:
3
the
knight no longer has segments of resignation, but neither does
he have the suppleness of a poet or of a dancer, he does not
make himself obvious, he resembles rather a bourgeois, a tax-
collector, a tradesman, he dances with so much precision that
they say that he is only walking or even staying still, he blends
into the wall but the wall has become alive, he is painted grey
on grey, or like the Pink Panther he has painted the world in
his own colour, he has acquired something invulnerable, and
he knows that by loving, even by loving and for loving, one
must be self-contained, abandon love and the ego ... (it is
curious that Lawrence has written similar passages). There is
now only an abstract line, a pure movement which is difficult
to discover, he never begins, he takes things by the middle, he
is always in the middle - in the middle of two other lines?
' Only movements concern me.'
A cartography is suggested today by Deligny when he
follows the course of autistic children: the lines of custom, and
also the supple lines where the child produces a loop, finds
something, claps his hands, hums a ritornello, retraces his
128 Dialogues
steps, and then the ' lines of wandering' mixed up in the two
others.
4
All these lines are tangled. Deligny produces a geo-
analysis, an analysis of lines wruch takes his path far from
psychoanalysis, and which relates not only to autistic
children, but to all children, to all adults (watch someone
walking down the street and see what little inventions he
introduces into it, if he is not too caught up in his rigid
segmentarity, what little inventions he puts there), and not
only their walk, but their gestures, their affects, their
language, their style. First of all, we should give a more
precise status to the three lines. For the molar lines of rigid
segmentarity, we can indicate a certain number of charac-
teristics which explain their assemblage, or rather their
functioning in the assemblages of which they form part (and
there is no assemblage which does not include them). Here
therefore are the approximate characteristics of the first kind
of line.
( 1) Segments depend on binary machines which can be
very varied if need be. Binary machines of social classes; of
sexes, man-woman; of ages, child-adult; of races,
black-white; of sectors, public-private; of subjectivations,
ours-not ours. These binary machines are all the more com-
plex for cutting across each other, or colliding against each
other, confronting each other, and they cut us up in all sorts of
directions. And they are not roughly dualistic, they are rather
dichotomic: they can operate diachronically (if you are neither
a nor b, then you are c: dualism has shifted, and no longer
relates to simultaneous elements to choose between, but suc-
cessive choices; if you are neither black nor whi te, you are a
half-breed; if you are neither man nor woman, you are a
transvestite: each time the machine with binary elements will
produce binary choices between elements which are not pre-
sent at the first cutti ng-up).
(2) Segments also imply devices of power, which vary
greatly among themselves, each fixing the code and the
territory of the corresponding segment. These are the devices
Many Politics 129
which have been analysed so profoundly by Foucault, who
refused to see in them the simple emanations of a pre-existing
State apparatus. Each device of power is a code-territory
complex (do not approach my territory, it is I who give the
orders here . . . ). M. de Charlus collapses at Mme Verdurin's,
because he has ventured beyond his own territory and his
code no longer works. The segmentarity of adjacent offices in
Kafka. It is by discovering this segmentarity and this
heterogeneity of modern powers that Foucault was able to
break with the holJow abstractions of the State and of ' the' law
and renew all the assumptions of political analysis. It is not
that t he apparatus of the State has no meaning: it has itself a
very special function, in as much as it overcodes all the
segments, both those that it takes on itself at a given moment
and those that it leaves outside itself. Or rather the apparatus
of the State is a concrete assemblage which realizes the
machine of overcoding of a society. This machine in its turn is
thus not the State itself, it is the abstract machine which
organizes the dominant utterances and the established order
of a society, the dominant languages and knowledge, confor-
mist actions and feelings, the segments which prevail over the
others. The abstract machine of overcoding ensures the
homogenization of different segments, their convertibility,
their translatability, it regulates the passages from one side to
the other, and the prevailing force under which this takes
place. It does not depend on the State, but its effectiveness
depends on the State as the assemblage which realizes it in a
social field (for example, different monetary segments,
different. kinds of money have rules of convertibility, between
themselves and. with goods, which refer to a central bank as
State apparatus). Greek geometry functioned as an abstract
machine which organized the social space, in the condi tions of
the concrete assemblage of power of the city. We should ask
today which are the abstract machines of overcoding, which
are exercised as a result of the forms of the modern State. One
can even conceive of ' forms of knowledge' which make their
130 Dialogues
offers of service to the State, proposing themselves for its
realization, claiming to provide the best machines for the tasks
or the aims of the State: today informatics? But also the
human sciences? There are no sciences of the State but there
are abstract machines which have relationships of interde-
pendence with the State. This is why, on the line of rigid
segmentarity, one must distinguish the devices of power which
code the diverse segments, the abstract machine which overcodes
them and regulates their relationships and the apparatus of the
State which realizes this machine.
(3) Finally, all rigid segmentarity, all the lines of rigid
segmentarity, enclose a certain plane, which concerns both
forms and their development, subjects and their formation. A
plane of organization which always has at its disposal a
supplementary dimension ( overcoding). The education of the
subject and the harmonization of the form have constantly
haunted our culture, inspir:ed the segmentations, the
planifications, the binary machines which cut them and the
abstract machines which cut them again. As Pierre Fleutiaux
says, when an outline begins to tremble, when a segment
wavers, we call the terrible Lunette to cut things up, the laser
which puts forms in order and subjects in their place.
5
The status of the other type oflines seems to be completely
different. The segments here are not the same, proceeding by
thresholds, constituting becomings, blocs of becoming,
marking continuums of intensity, combinations of fluxes. The
abstract machines here are not the same, they are mutating
and not overcoding, marking their mutations at each
threshold and each combination. The plane is not the same,
plane of consistence or of immanence which tears from forms
particles between which there are now only relationships of
speed and slowness, and tears from subjects affects which now
only carry out individuations by 'hecceity'. The binary
machines no longer engage with this real, not because the
dominant segment would change (a particular class, a par-
ticular sex ... ), nor because mixtures like bisexuality or class-
Many Politics 131
mJXJng would be imposed: on the contrary, because the
molecular lines make fluxes of deterritorialization shoot be-
tween the segments, fluxes which no longer belong to one or to
the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical becoming of
the two, molecular sexuality which is no longer that of a man
or of a woman, molecular masses which no longer have the
outline of a class, molecular races like little lines which no
longer respond to the great molar oppositions. It is certainly
no longer a matter of a synthesis of the two, of a synthesis of I
and 2, but of a third which always comes from elsewhere and
disturbs the binarity of the two, not so much inserting itself in
their opposition as in their complementarity. It is not a matter
of adding a new segment on to the preceding segments on the
line (a third sex, a third class, a third age), but of tracing
another line in the middle of the segmentary line, in the
middle of the segments, which carries them off according to
the variable speeds and slownesses in a movement of flight or
of flux. To continue the use of geographical terms: imagine
that between the West and the East a certain segmentarity is
introduced, opposed in a binary machine, arranged in the
State apparatuses, overcoded by an abstract machine as the
sketch of a World Order. It is then from North to South that the
destabilization takes place, as Giscard d' Estaing said
gloomily, and a stream erodes a path, even if it is a shaJlow
stream, which brings everything into play and diverts the
plane of organization. A Corsican here, elsewhere a
Palestinian, a plane hijacker, a tribal upsurge, a feminist
movement, a Green ecologist, a Russian dissident- there will
always be someone to rise up to the south. Imagi ne the Greeks
and the Trojans as two opposed segments, face to face: but
look, the Amazons arrive, they begin by overthrowing the'
Trojans, so that the Greeks cry, 'The Amazons are with us',
but they turn against the Greeks, attacking them from behind
with the violence of a torrent. This is how Kleist's Penthesilea
begins. The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always
negotiable; but not the little crack, the imperceptible ruptures
132 Dialogues
which come from the south. We say 'south' without attaching
any importance to this. We talk of the south in order to mark a
direction which is different from that of the line of segments.
But everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is -
that is, his line of slope or flight. Nations, classes, sexes have
their south. Godard: what counts is not merely the two
opposed camps on the great Line where they confront each
other, but also the frontier, through which everything passes
and shoots on a broken molecular line of a different
orientation. May 1968 was an explosion of such a molecular
line, an irruption of the Amazons, a frontier which traced its
unexpected line, drawing along the segments like torn-off
blocs which have lost their bearings.
We may be criticized for not escaping from dualism, with
two kinds of lines, which are cut up, planified, machined,
differently. But what defines dualism is not the number of
terms, any more than one escapes from dualism by addi ng
other terms (X 2). You only escape dualisms effectivel y by
shifting them like a load, and when you find between the
terms, whether they are two or more, a narrow gorge like a
border or a frontier which will turn the set into a multiplicity,
independently of the number of parts. What we call an
assemblage is, precisely, a multiplicity. Now, any assemblage
necessarily includes lines of rigid and binary segmentarity, no
less than molecular lines, or lines of border, of flight or slope.
The devices of power do not seem to us to be exactly con-
stitutive of assemblages, but to form part of them in one
dimension on which the whole assemblage can topple over or
turn back on itself. But, in fact , in so far as dualisms belong to
this dimension, there is another dimension of the assemblage
which does not form a dualism with this latter. There is no
dualism between abstract overcoding machines and abstract
machines of mutation: the latter find themselves
segmentarized, organized, overcoded by the others, at the
same time as they undermine them; both work within each
other at the heart of the assemblage. In the same way there is
Many Politics 133
no dualism between the two planes of transcendent organ-
ization and immanent consistence: indeed it is from the forms
and subjects of the first plane that the second constantly tears
the particles between which there are no longer relationships
of speed and slowness, and it is also on the plane of imman-
ence that the other arises, working in it to block movements,
fix affects, organize forms and subjects. The speed indicators
presuppose forms that they dissolve, no less than the organ-
izations presuppose the material in fusion which they put in
order. We do not therefore speak of a dualism between two
kinds of 'things', but of a multiplicity of dimensions, of lines
and directions in the heart of an assemblage. To the question
' How can desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its
slavery?' we reply that the powers which crush desire, or
which subj ugate it, themselves already form part of
assemblages of desire: it is sufficient for desire to follow this
particular line, for it to find itself caught, like a boat, under
this particular wind. There is no desirefor revolution, as there
is no desire for power, desire to oppress or to be oppressed; but
revolution, oppression, power, etc., are the act ual component
lines of a given assemblage. It is not that these Lines are pre-
existent; they are traced out, they are formed, immanent to
each other, mixed up in each other, at the same time as the
assemblage of desire is formed, wit h its machines tangled up
and its planes intersecting. We don't know in advance which
one will function as line of gradient, or in what form it will be
barred. T his is true of a musical assemblage, for example:
with its codes and territorialities, its constraints and its
apparatuses of power, its dichotomized measures, its melodic
and harmonic forms which are developed, its transcendent
plane of organization, but also with its transformers of speed
between sound molecules, its ' non-pulsed time', its pro-
liferations and dissolutions, its child-becomings, woman-
becomings, animal-becomings, its immanent plane of con-
sistence. The long-term role of the power of the church, in
musical assemblages, and what the musicians succeed in
134 Dialogues
making pass into this, or into the middle. This is true of all
assemblages.
What must be compared in each case are the movements of
deterritorialization and the processes of reterritorialization
which appear in an assemblage. But what do they mean, these
words which Felix invents to make them into variable
coefficients? We could go back to the commonplaces of the
evolution of humanity: man, delerrilorializ.ed animal. When they
say to us that the hominoid removed its front paws from the
earth and that the hand is at first locomotor, then prehensile,
these are the thresholds or the quanta of deterritorialization,
but each time with a complementary reterritorialization: the
locomotor hand as the deterritorialized paw is reterritorialized
on the branches which it uses to pass from tree to tree; the
prehensile hand as deterritorialized locomotion is re-
territorialized on the torn-ofT, borrowed elements called t o ~ s
that it will brandish or propel. But the 'stick' tool is itself a
deterritorialized branch; and the great inventions of man
imply a passage to the steppe as deterritorialized forest; at the
same time man is reterritorialized on the steppe. The breast is
said to be a mammary gland deterritorialized by vertical
stature; and the mouth a deterritorialized animal mouth, by
the turning-up of the mucous membranes to the exterior: but a
correlative reterritorialization is carried out of the lips on to
the breast and conversely, so that the bodies and the en-
vironments are traversed by very different speeds of de-
territorialization, by differential speeds, whose com-
plementarities form continuums of intensity, but also give rise
to processes of reterritorialization. At the limit, it is the Earth
itself, the deterritorialized ('the desert grows .. .'), and it is
the nomad, the man of earth, the man of deterritoriali zation-
although he is also the one who does not move, who remains
attached to the environment, desert or steppe.
Many Politics 135
II
But it is in concrete social fields, at specific moments, that the
comparative movements of deterritorialization, the continuums
ofintensity and the combinations of flux that they form must be
studied. We take some examples from around the eleventh
century: the movement of flight of monetary masses; the great
deterritorialization of peasant masses under the pressure of the
latest invasions and the increased demands of the lords; the
deterritorialization of the masses of the nobility, which takes
forms as varied as the Crusades, settlement in towns, the new
types of exploitation of the earth (renting or wage labour); the
new forms of towns, whose install ations become less and less
territorial; the deterritorialization of the Church, with the dis-
possession of its lands, its ' peace of God', its organization of
Crusades; the deterritorialization of woman with chivalric love
and then courtly love. The Crusades (including the Children's
Crusade) may appear as a threshold of combination of all these
movements. One might say in a certain sense that what is
primary in a society are the lines, the movements of flight. For,
far from being a flight from the social, far from being utopian or
even ideological, these constitute the social field, trace out its
gradation and its boundaries, the whole of its becoming. A
Marxist can be quickly recognized when he says that a society
contradicts itself, is defined by its contradictions, and in particu-
lar by its class contradictions. We would rather say that, in a
society, everything flees and that a society is defined by its lines
of flight which affect masses of all kinds (here again, ' mass' is a
molecular notion). A society, but also a collective assemblage, is
defined first by its points of deterritorialization, its fluxes of
deterritorialization. The great geographical adventures of
history are lines of flight, that is, long expeditions on foot, on
horseback or by boat: that of the Hebrews in the desert, that of
Genseric the Vandal crossing the Mediterranean, that of the
nomads across the steppe, the long march of the Chinese - it is
always on a line of flight that we create, not, indeed, because we
136 Dialogues
imagi ne that we are dreaming but, on the contrary, because
we trace out the real on it, we compose there a plane of
consistence: To fl ee, but in fl eeing to seek a weapon.
This primacy of li nes of flight must not be understood
chronologically, or in the sense of an eternal generality. It is
rather the fact and the right of the untimely: a time which is
not pulsed, a hecceity like a wind which blows up, a midnight,
a midday. For reterritorializations happen at the same time:
monetary ones on new circuits; rural ones on new modes of
exploitation; urban ones on new functions, etc. To the extent
that an accumulation of all these reterritorializations takes
place, a ' class' then emerges which benefi ts particularly from
it, capable of homogenizing it and overcoding all its segments.
At the limit it would be necessary to distinguish the
movements of masses of all kinds, with their respective
coefficients of speed, and the stabilizations of classes, with
their segments distributed in the reterritorialization of the
whole- the same thing acting as mass and as class, but on two
different lines which are entangled, wi th contours which do
not coincide. One is then better able to understand why we
sometimes say that there are at least three different lines,
sometimes only two, sometimes only one which is very
muddled. Sometimes three lines because the line of flight or
rupture combines all the movements of deterritorialization,
precipitates their quanta, tears from them the accelerated
particles which come into contact with one another, carries
them on to a plane of consistence or a mutating machine; and
then a second, molecular line where the deterritorializations
are merely relative, always compensated by re-
territorializations which impose on them so many loops,
detours, of equilibrium and stabilization; finally the molar line
with clearl y determined segments, where the reterritorial-
izations accumulate to form a plane of organization and pass
into an overcoding machine. Three lines, one of which would
be like the nomadic line, another migrant and the third
sedentary {the migrant is not at all the same as the nomadic).
Marzy Politics 137
Or else there would be only two lines, because the molecular
line would appear only to be oscillating between the two
extremes, sometimes carried along by the combination of
fluxes of deterritorialization, sometimes brought back to the
accumulation of reterritorializations (the migrant sometimes
allies with the nomad, sometimes is a mercenary or the
federate of an empire: the Ostrogoths and Visigoths). Or else
there is only one line, the primary line of flight, of border or
frontier, which is relativized in the second line, which allows
itself to be stopped or cut in the third. But even then it may be
convenient to present THE line as being born from the ex-
plosion of the two others. Nothing is more complicated than
the lii ne or the lines - it is that which Melville speaks of,
uniting the boats in their organized segmentarity, Captain
Ahab in his animal and-molecular-becoming, the white whale
in its crazy flight. Let us go back to the regimes of signs about
which we spoke earlier: how the line of flight is barred under a
despotic regime, affected by a negative sign; how it finds in the
Hebrews' regime a positive but relative value, cut up into
successive processes . . . These were two cases only, briefly
outlined, and there are many others: each time it is the
essential element of politics. Politics is active ex erimentation,
since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to
turn. Draw the line, says the accountant: but one can in fact
draw it anywhere.
There are so many dangers: each of the three lines has its
dangers. The danger of rigid segmentarity or of the cutting
line appears everywhere. For this concerns not merely our
relationships with the State but all the devices of power which
work upon our bodies, all the binary machines which cut us
up, the abstract machines which overcode us: it concerns our
way of perceiving, acting, feel ing, our regimes of signs. It is
true t hat national States oscillate between two poles: when it
is liberal, the State is merely an apparatus which directs the
realization of the abstract machine; when it is totalitarian it
takes upon itself the abstract machine and tends to become
oj .r 11 "' ... ,
.r,. .
138 Dialogues
indistinguishable from it. But the segments which run through
us and through which we pass are, in any case, marked by a
rigidity which reassures us, while turning us into creatures
which are the most fearful, but also the most pitiless and
bitter. The danger is so pervasive and so obvious that we
should rather ask ourselves why we need such segmentarity
despite all this. Even ifwe had the power to blow it up, could
we succeed in doing so without destroying ourselves, since it is
so much a part of the conditions of life, including our
organism and our very reason? The prudence with which we
must manipulate that line, th.sErecautions we must take to
soften it, to suspend it, to divert it, to undermine it, testify to a
long labour which is not merely aimed against the State and
the powers that be, but directly at ourselves.
All the more so, since the second line has its own dangers. It
is certainly not sufficient to attain or to trace out a molecular
line, to be carried along a supple line. Here again, everything
is involved, our perception, our actions and passions, our
regimes of signs. But not only may we discover on a supple
line the same dangers as on the rigid one, merely mini-
aturized, scattered or rather molecularized: little Oedipal
communities have replaced the family Oedipus, mobile rela-
tionships of force have taken over from the devices of power,
cracks have replaced the segregations. There is worse to come:
it is the supple lines themselves which produce or encounter
their own dangers, a threshold crossed too quickly, an in-
tensity become dangerous because it could not be tolerated.
You have not taken enough precautions. This is the 'black
hole' phenomenon: a supple line rushes into a black hole from
which it will not be able to extricate itself. Guattari discusses
micro-fascisms which exist in a social field without necessarily
being centralized in a particular apparatus of the State. We
have left behind the shores of rigid segmentarity, but we have
entered a regime which is no less organized where each
embeds himself in his own black hole and becomes dangerous
in that hole, with a self-assurance about his own case, his role
Many Politics 139
and his mtsston, which is even more disturbing than the
certainties of the first line: the Stalins of little groups, local
law-givers, micro-fascisms of gangs ... Some have said that
we see the schizophrenic as the true revolutionary. We be-
lieve, rather, that schizophrenia is the descent of a molecular
process into a black hole. Marginals have always inspired fear
in us, and a slight horror. They are not enough.
( NOTE: In any case, they scare me. There is a molecular
speech of madness, or of the drug addict or the delinquent in
vivo which is no more valid that the great discourses of a
psychiatrist in vitro. There is as much self-assurance on the
former's part as certainty on the latter's part. It is not the
marginals who create the lines; they install themselves on
these lines and make them their property, and this is fine
when they have that strange modesty of men of the line, the
prudence of the experimenter, but it is a disaster when they
slip into a black hole from which they no longer utter anything
but the micro-fascist speech of their dependency and their
giddiness: 'We are the avant-garde', ' We are the marginals.'
G.D.)
It even happens that the two lines are mutually sustaining
and that the organization of a more and more rigid
segmentarity on the level of great molar wholes enters on to
the same circuit as the management of the little fears and of
the black holes into which everyone plunges in the molecular
network. Paul Virilio depicts the world State as it is sketched
out today: a State of absolute peace still more terrifying than
that of total war, having realized its full identity with the
abstract machine, and in which the equilibrium of spheres of
influence and of great segments intercommunicates with a
'secret capillarity'- where the luminous and clearly dissected
city now shelters only nocturnal troglodytes, each embedded
in his own black hole, a 'social swamp' which exactly com-
pletes the 'obvious and super-organized society' .
6
And it would be wrong to think that it is sufficient, in the
end, to take the line of flight or rupture. First, one must trace
-
140 Dialogues
it out, know where and how to trace it out. And then it has its
own danger, which is perhaps the worst of all. It is not j ust
that lines of night, the most steeply sloping, risk being barred,
segmentarized, drawn into black holes. T hey have yet another
special risk: that of tu_!!!ing into lines of abolition, of des-
truction, of others and of oneself. A passion for abolition. Just
like music - why does it give us the urge to die? Marie's
death-cry, stretched out lengthways, floating along the surface
of the water, and Lulu's death-cry, vertical and celestial. How
is it that all the examples of lines of flight that we have given,
even from writers we like, turn out so badly? Lines of flight '
turn out badly not because they are imaginary, but precisely
because they are real and in their reality. They turn out badly
not just because they are short-circui ted by the two other
lines, but on their own account, as a result of a danger which
they conceal. Kleist and his suicide pact, Holderlin and his
madness, Fitzgerald and his destruction, Virginia Woolf and
her disappearance. One can imagine some of these deaths
being peaceful and even happy, the hecceity of a death which
is no longer that of a person, but the extraction of a pure event
-at its own time, on its own plane. But, indeed, can the plane
of immanence, the plane of consistence, only bring us a death
which is relatively dignified and wi thout bitterness? It was not
made for that. Even if aU creation comes to an end in its
abolition, which was fashioning it from the start, even if all
music is the pursuit of silence, they cannot be j udged
according to their end or their supposed ai m, for they exceed
them in all dimensions. When they end up with death, this is a
function of a danger which is proper to them, and not of their
destination. This is our mai n point: why on lines of flight, qua
real, does the ' metaphor' of war recur so frequently, even at
the most personal, the most individual level? Holderlin and
the battlefield, Hye_erion. Kleist: everywhere in his work is the
idea of a war-machine against the apparatuses of the State,
but in his own life also is the idea of a war to be waged, which
must lead him to suicide. Fitzgerald: ' I had the feeling of
Many Politics 141
standing in the dusk on an abandoned shooting field. ' Criticism
and the clinic: life and work are the same thing, when they have
adapted the line of flight which makes them the components of
the same war-machine. In these conditions life has for a long
time ceased to be personal and the work has ceased to be li terary
or text ual.
War is certainly not a metaphor. Like Felix, we assume that
the war-machine has a nature and origin quite different from
that of the apparatus of the State. The war-machine would have
its origin among the nomadic shepherds, against the imperial
sedentary peoples; it implies an arithmetical in an
open in which men and animals are distributed, as
opposed to the organization of the State which
di vides out a closed space (even when the war-machine is related
to a geometry, it is a quite different geometry, a sort of
Archimedean geometry, a geometry of ' problems', and not of
' theorems' like Euclid's). Conversely, State power does not rest
on a war-machine, but on the exercise of binary machines which
run through us and the abstract machine which overcodes us: a
whole ' police'. The war-machine, on the other hand, is run
through with woman-becomings, animal-becomings, the becom-
ings-imperceptible of the warriror (cf. the secret as the invention
of the war-machine, as opposed to the ' publicity' of the despot or
the man of the State). Dumezil has often emphasized this
eccentric position of the warrior in relation to the State. Luc de
Heusch shows how the war-machine comes from outside,
hurling itself on to an already-developed State which did not
include it.
7
In one of his last texts Pierre Clastres explains how
the function of war in primitive groups was precisely that of
warding off the formation of a State apparatus.
8
One might say
that the State apparatus and the war-machine do not belong to
the same lines, are not constructed on the same lines: while the
State apparatus belongs to the lines of rigid segmentarity, and
even conditions them in so far as it realizes their overcoding, the
war-machine follows lines of flight and of the steepest gradient,
coming from the heart of the steppe or the desert and sinking
142 Dialogues
into the Empire. Genghis Khan and the emperor of China.
Military organization is an organization of flight - even the
one which Moses gave to his people - not merely because it
consists in fleeing something, or even in putti ng the enemy to
flight, but because it traces, wherever it passes, a line of flight
or deterritorialization which is at one with its own politics and
its own strategy. Under these conditions, one of the most
formidable problems which States will have will be that of
integrating the war-machine into the form of an in-
stitutionalized army, to make it one with their general police
(Tamburlaine is perhaps the most striking example of such a
conversion). The army is never anything but a compromise.
The war-machine may become mercenary or allow itself to be
appropriated by the State to the very extent that it conquers
it. But there will always be a tension between the State
apparatus with its requirement for self-preservation and the
war-machine in its undertaking to destroy the State, to des-
troy the subjects of the State and even to destroy itself or to
dissolve itself along the line of flight. If there is no history from
the viewpoint of nomads, although everythi ng passes through
them, to the point that they are like the 1wumena or the un-
knowable of history, it is because they cannot be separated
from this task of aboli tion which makes the nomadic empires
vanish as if of their own accord, at the same time as the war-
machine is either destroyed or passes into the service of the
State. In short, each time it is traced by a war-machine, the
line of flight is converted into a line of abolition, of destruction
of others and of itself. And that is the special danger of this
type of line, which mingles with, but is not identical to, the
previous dangers. To the extent that each time a line of flight
turns into a line of death, we do not invoke an internal impulse
of the ' death instinct' type, we invoke another assemblage of
desire which brings into play a machine which is obj ectively
or extrinsically definable. It is therefore not metaphorically
that each time someone destroys others and destroys himself
he has invented on his line of flight his own war-machine:
Many Politics 143
strindberg's conjugal war-machine, Fitzgerald's alcoholic
war-machine ... All Kleist's work rests on the following ob-
servation: there is no longer a war-machine on a grand scale
like that of the Amazons, the war-machine is no longer any-
thi ng more than a dream which itself vanishes and gives way
to national armies (the Prince of Homburg); how can one
reinvent a new type of war machine (Michael Kohlhaas), how
can one trace out the line of flight in spite of knowing that it
leads us to abolition (suicide pact)? To wage one's own war?
How etherwise is one to outmanoeuvre this final trap?
The differences o ~ s between the individual and the
collective, for we see no du)Jity between these two types of
problem: there is no subject! of enunciation, but every proper l1/
name is collective, every assemblage is already collective. J/
Neither do the differences pass between the natural and the
artificial since they both belong to the machine and inter-
change there. Nor between the spontaneous and the organ-
ized, since the only question is one of modes of organization.
Nor between the segmentary and the centralized, since
centralization is itself an organization which rests on a form of
rigid segmentarity. The effective differences pass between the (
Jines, even though they are all immanent to one another, all
entangled in one another. This is why the question of
schizoanalysis or pragmatics, micro-politics itself, never con-
sists in interpreting, but merely in asking what are your lines,
individual or group, and what are the dangers on each.
( I) What are your rigid segments, your binary and over-
coding machines? For even these are not given to you
ready-made, we are not simply divided up by binary machines
of class, sex or age: there are others which we constantly shift,
invent without realizing it. And what are the dangers if we
blow up these segments too quickly? Wouldn' t this kill the
organism itself, the organism which possesses its own binary
machines, even in its nerves and its brain?
(2) What are your supple lines, what are your fluxes and
thresholds? Which is your set of relative deterritorializations
144 Dialogues
and correlative reterri torializations? And the distribution of
black holes: which are the black holes of each one of us, where
a beast lurks or a micro-fascism thrives?
{3) What are your lines of flight, where the fluxes are
combined, where the thresholds reach a point of adj acence
and rupture? Are they still tolerable, or are they already
caught up in a machine of destruction and self-destruction
which would reconstitute a molar fascism? It may happen that
an assemblage of desire and of enunciation is reduced to its
most rigid lines, its devices of power. There are assemblages
which have only these sorts of lines. But other dangers stalk
each of them, more supple and viscous dangers, ofwhich each
of us alone is judge, as long as there is still time. The question
' How is it that desire can desire its own repression?' does not
give rise to real theoretical difficul ty, but to many practical
difficulties each time. There is desire as soon as there is a
machine or ' body without organs'. But there are bodies with-
out organs like hardened empty envelopes, because their
organic components have been blown up too quickly and too
violently, an 'overdose' . There are bodies without organs
which are cancerous and fascist, in black holes or machines of
can desire outmanoeu_vre all by managing '1
1ts plane of Immanence and of cons1stence wh1ch each time
runs up against these dangers?
T here is no general prescription. We have done wit h all
globalizing concepts. Even concepts are hecceities, events.
What is interesting about concepts like desire, or machine, or
assemblage is that they only have value in their variables, and
in the maxi mum of variables which they allow. We are not for
concepts as big as hollow teeth, THE law, THE master, THE
rebel. We are not here to keep the tally of the dead and the
victims of history, the martyrdom of the Gulags, and to draw
the conclusion that 'The revolution is impossible, but we
thi nkers must think the impossible since the impossible only
exists through our thought!' It seems to us that there would
never have been the tiniest Gulag if the victims had kept up
Many Politics 145
the same discourse as those who weep over them today. The
victims would have had to think and live in a quite different
way to give substance to those who weep in their name, and
who think in their name, and who give lessons in their name.
It was their life-force which impelled them, not their
bitterness; their sobriety, not their ambition; their anorexia,
not their huge appetites, as Zola would have said. We have set
out to wri te a book of life, not of accounts, or of the tribunal
even of the people or of pure thought. The question of a
revolution has never been utopian spontaneity versus State
organization. When we challenge the model of the State
apparatus or of the party organization which is modelled on
the conquest of that apparatus, we do not, however, fall into
the grotesque alternatives: either that of appealing to a state of
nat ure, to a spontaneous dynamic, or that of becoming the
self-styled lucid thinker of an impossible revolution, whose
very impossibility is such a source of pleasure. The question
has always been organizational, not at all ideological: is an
organization possible which is not modelled on the apparatus
of the State, even to prefigure the State to come? Perhaps a
war-machine with its lines of flight? In order to oppose the
war-machine to the State apparatus in every assemblage -
even a musical or literary one - it would be necessary to
evalua te the degree of proxi mity to this or that pole. But how
would a war-machine, in any domain whatever, become mod-
ern, and how would it ward ofT its own fascist dangers, when
confronted by the totalitarian dangers of the State, its own
dangers of destruction in comparison with the conservation of
the State? In a certain way it is very simple, this happens on
its own and every day. The mistake would be to say: there is a
globalizing State, the master of its plans and extending its
traps; and then, a force of resistance which will adopt the form
of the State even if it entails betraying us, or else which will
fall into local spontaneous or partial struggles, even if it entails
being s uffocated and beaten every time. The most centralized
State is not at all the master of its plans, it is also an ex-
146 Dialogues
peri menter, it performs injections, it is unable to look into the
fu ture: the economists of the State declare themselves in-
capable of predicti ng the increase in a monetary mass.
American politics is forced to proceed by empirical injections,
not at all by apodictic programmes. What a sad and sham
game is played by those who speak of a supremely cunning
Master, in order to present the image of themselves as
rigorous, incorruptible and ' pessimist' thinkers. It is along the
different lines of complex assemblages that the powers that be
carry out their experiments, but along them also arise ex-
perimenters of another kind, thwarting predictions, tracing
out active lines of flight, looking for the combination of these
lines, increasing their speed or slowing it down, creating the
plane of consistence fragment by fragment, with a
war-machine which would weigh the dangers ~ h t it en-
countered at each step.
What characteri zes our situation is both beyond and on this
side of the State. Beyond national States, the development of a
world market, the power of multinational companies, the
outline of a ' planetary' organization, the extension of
capitalism to the whole social body, clearly forms a great
abst ract machine which overcodes the monetary, industrial
and technological fluxes. At the same ti me the means of
exploitation, control and surveillance become more and more
subtle and diffuse, in a certain sense molecular {the workers of
the rich countries necessarily take part in the plunderi ng of
the Third World, men take part in the over-.exploitation of
women, etc.). But the abstract machine, with its dysfunctions,
is no more infallible than the national States which are not
able to regulate them on their own territory and from one
terri tory to another. The State no longer has at its disposal the
political, insti tutional or even financial means which would
enable it to fend off the social repercussions of the machine; it
is doubtful whether it can eternally rel y on the old forms like
the police, armies, bureaucracies, even trade union
bureaucracies, collective installations, schools, families.
Many Politics 147
Enormous land slides are happening on this side of the state,
following lines of gradient or of fl ight, affecting principally:
(I) the marking out of territories; (2) the mechanisms of
economic subj ugation {new characteristics of un-
employment, of inflation); (3) the basic regulatory
frameworks (crisis of the school, of trade unions, of the
army, ofwomen ... ); {4) the nature of the demands which
become qualitative as much as quantitative ('quality oflife'
rather than the 'standard of living').
All this constitutes what can be called a right to desire. It is not
surprising that all kinds of minority questions - linguistic,
ethnic, regional, about sex, or youth - resurge not only as
archaisms, but in up-to-date revolutionary forms which call
once more into question in an entirely immanent manner both
the global economy of the machine and the assemblages of
national States. Instead of gambling on the eternal impos-
sibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-
machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is
in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating,
living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a
plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organ-
ization of the World and the States?
9
For, once again, the
world and its States are no more masters of their plane than
revolutionaries are condemned to the deformation of theirs.
Everything is played in uncerta in games, ' front to front, back
to back, back to front .. .'. The question of the future of the
revolution is a bad question because, in so far as it is asked,
there are so many people who do not become revolutionaries,
and this is exactl y why it is done, to impede the question of the
revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in every
place.
Notes
Preface
Translators' note: in English in the original.
Translators' Introduction
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction,
The Athlone Press, 1987.
2 English translation, London: The Athlone Press, 1983.
3 English translation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
4 English translation, Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, The Athlone
Press, 1987.
5 English translation, The Athlone Press, forthcoming.
6 Vincennes seminar, 7 March 1978.
7 See ' Rhizome', translated by Paul Patton, I & C, no. 8, Spring 1981, p.
50.
8 See p. 127, below.
Chapter I
Marcel Proust, By Way ofSaintt-Btuue, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner,
London: Chatto & Windus, 1958, pp. 194-5.
2 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, 'Schopenhauer Educator', in Untimely
Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983, p. 159.
3 Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings, St Albans: Panther, 1974, pp.
168-70.
4 Translators' note: the three phrases in inverted commas are in English
in the original.
5* Translators' note: in other words, civil servants.
6* Translators' note: the third essay in his Untimely Meditations, op. cit.
7 Translators' note: as described on p. xii, the French mot d'ordre is
usually translated as 'slogan'. In this context it could be rendered as
150 Dialogues
'command' or 'command function'. Professor Deleuxe wishes to retain
the connection with language and expressions such as 'password'.
8* Translators' note: in English in the original.
9* Translators' note: ' Du roti de An oblique reference to Proust's Du
Coti dt Swann, usually translated as 'Swann's Way', but literally,
' In the direction of Swann'.
10* Translators' note: Gilles Deleuze, Diffirence et Ripitition, Paris: PUF,
1968.
II* Translators' note: Mi chel Foucault, L 'Ordre du Discours, Paris:
Gallimard, 197 1; translated by R. Swyer as 'T he Discourse on
Language' , appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper
& Row, 1972.
12 cf. G. G. Simpson, L'Evolution et sa signification, Paris: Payot, 1951.
13 Henry Miller, Hamlet, Paris: Correa, p. 49.
Chapter 2
cf. The whole analysis of Leslie Fiedler, The Return of tile Vanishing
American, London: J onat han Cape, 1968.
2 A. Thynbee, A Stut!J of History, London: Oxford University Press, 1972,
pp. 132 If.
3 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1971 , pp. 146--7.
4 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Craclc-Up, with other Pieces and Stories,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, pp. 52-3.
5 Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1973.
6* Translators' note: for a discussion of the key role of the concept of dilirt
in Deleuze's work see J ean-J acques Lecercle, Philosophy through the
Looking-Glass, London: Hutchinson, 1985, especially Chapter 5.
7 Lawrence, op. cit. , p. 140. And on the double turning-away, cf.
Holderlin's Remarques sur Oedipe, with commentaries by J ean Beaufret,
Paris: UGE, 1965. Andjonas, trans.J . Lindon, Paris: Minuit, 1955.
8 J acques Besse, La grande Paque, Paris: Belfond, 1969.
9* Translators' note: in English in the original.
10 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, St Albans: Panther, 1966, pp. 110- 11.
II* Translators' note: the phrase les poetes maudits literally 'the accursed
poets') was coined by Paul Verlaine in 1884 in a brochure about three
symbolist poets, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Tristan Corbiere.
12 Lawrence, op. cit. ; cf. the whole chapter on Whitman, whi ch opposes
sympathy to identification.
13 Henry Miller, Sexus, St Albans: Panther, 1970, p. 19.
14* Translators' note: in English in the original.
Noles 151
15 cf. the remarks of Regnault in the Preface to the translation of
Balodin du monde occidental, ed. Le Graphe.
16 cf. J .L. Dillard's book on Black English, New York: Random House,
1972. And on the problem of languages in South Africa, see Breyten-
bach, Feu Froid, Paris: Bourgois, 1976.
17* Translators' note: in English in the original.
18* Translators' note: manque-a-itre is a neologism created by Lacan which
means, literally, ' lack-to-be'. Lacan himself has suggested ' want to be'
as an English rendering: see his The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, Harmondswonh: Pen-
guin, 1979, p. 281.
19 J oe Bosquet, Traduit du silence, Paris: Gallimard, and Lts Capitales, Paris:
Cercle du livre. And Blanchot 's wonderful discussions of the event,
notably in L 'Espact littbaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955.
20 cf. L. White's st udy of the stirrup and the feudal system, Technologie
midiivale ettransfomwtions sociales, Paris: Mouton.
21 On all these problems, see M. Dobb, Studies in the Developmenl of Capital-
ism, London: Routledge, 1946, chapters I and 3.
22* Translators' note: in English in the origi nal.
Chapter 3
1 E. A. Bennett, Ct que Jung a vraiment dit, Paris: Gerard, 1973, p. 80.
2* Translators' note: in English in the original.
3* Translators' note: see Chapter 2, note 18.
4 Serge Leclaire, Dimasquer It riel, Paris: Seuil , 1971, p. 35.
5 cf. the famous case of President Schreber and the verdict which grants
him his rights. [Translators' note: the reference is to Freud's essay,
'Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)', in Volume 9 of the Pelican Freud
Library, Case Histories ll, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.]
6 cf. Robert Castel, Lt Psychanalysme, Paris: Maspero, 1973.
7 cf. a curious text of J . A. Miller in Omicar, no. I.
8 J acques Donzelot, in The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley, London:
Hutchinson, 1980, shows that psychoanalysis has evolved from the
private relationship and that it perhaps entered the 'social' sector very
much earlier than has been thought.
9* Translators' note: ' hecceity' is a term from scholastic philosophy which
is sometimes rendered as 'thisness'. Professor Deleuze has suggested
the following note as explanati on of the term: ' Hatcceitas is a term
frequently used in the school of Duns Scotus, in order to designate the
indi viduation of beings. Deleuze uses it in a more special sense: in the
sense of an individuation which is not that of an object, nor of a P,Crson,
but rather of an event (wind, river, day or even hour of the day).
152 Dialogues
Deleuze's thesis is that all individuation is in fact of this type. This is
the thesis developed in Mille Pliluaux with Felix Guattari.'
10 Hecceity - and also longitude, latitude- are excellent medieval con-
cepts, whose analysis was taken as far as possible by certain
theologians, philosophers and physicists. We are entirely in their debt
in this respect, even if we use these concepts in a different sense.
II cf. the article of Roland Barthes on Schumann, ' Rasch', in Language,
discours, sociiti, Seuil , pp. 218 ff.
12 Translators' note: the original is, literally, ' Oh, I could tell you,
mummy', a line from a French nursery rhyme.
13 Rene Nellie, in L'Erotique des Troubadours, Tours, 1963, gives a good
analysis of this plane of immanence of courtly love, in the way it
challenges the interruptions that pleasure would like to introduce into
it. In a quite different assemblage, simi.lar utterances and techniques
are to be found in Taoism for the construction of a plane of immanence
of desire ( cf. R. Van Gulik, Sexual Lift in Ancient China, Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1961, and the commentaries ofj .-F. Lyotard, &onomie Libidinale,
Paris: Minuit, 1974).
14 D. H. Lawrence, Eros et les chiens, Paris: Bourgois, 1970, p. 290.
15 Malcolm Bradbury, The Machineries of j oy, St Albans: Panther, 1977,
pp. 38-9.
16 J ean Paris, L'Espace et le regard, Paris: Seuil , 1965.
17 cf. the crucial book of W. Labov, Sociolinguistic Paturns, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
18 Pierre Guiraud, Lt Testament de Vii/on, ou le gai sauoir de Ia basocht, Paris:
Gallimard, 1970.
19 Louis Wolfson, Lt Schko et Les Langues, Paris: GaUimard, 1970. [Trans-
lators' note: this book has an introduction by Deleuze. For a discussion
of Wolfson see Lecercle, Philosophy through the Loolr.ing-Glass, op. cit. , pp.
27-31.)
20 The only book to pose this question, to take the history of medicine as
one example, seems, as far as we know, to be that of Cruchet, De La
mithode de Ia midecine, Paris: PUF.
21 Translators' note: the French word rigime can be translated as ' diet' as
well as 'regime'.
22 Nathalie Sarraute, L'Ere du soupr;on, Paris: Gaiiimard, 1964, p. 52.
Chapter 4
I Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre.
2 Scott Fitzgerald, op. cit.
3 S. A. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968 (and the way in which Kierkegaard,
Notes 153
in relation to movement, sketches a series of scripts which already
belong to the cinema). .
4 Femand Oeligny, ' Cahiers de l' immuable', Recherches no. 18, Pans:
5
6
7
Recherches, 1975.
Pierrette Fleutiaux, Histoire du gouffre et de Ia lunetu, Paris: J ulliard, 1976.
Paul Virilio, Essai sur l'insicuriti du lerritoire, Paris: Stock, 1976.
Georges Oumezil, Heurel malhturdugeurritr, Paris: PUF, 1969; and
Epopie, Volume II, Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Luc du Heusch, Lt rot wre ou
l'origine de l'Etat, Paris: Gallimard. .
8 Pierre Clastres ' LaGuerre dans les societes, Libre, no. 1, Pans: Payot.
9 On all these cf. Felix Guattari, 'La Grande Illusion', in Lt Monde.
Index
Alquie, Ferdinand 12
Archimedes 141
Artaud, Antonin 89
Barthes, Roland 115-6
Bataille, Georges 47
Beckett, Samuel 4, 30, 74
Bergson, Henri 15
Besse, Jacques 41
Blanchot, Maurice 73
Boulez, Pierre 94
Bronte, Charlotte 93, 120
Burroughs, William R. 10, 18
Cage,john 94
Carroll, Lewis 49, 65, 69, 73,
119
Castaneda, Carlos 48
Castel, Robert 84
Celine (pseudonym of Louis
Ferdinand Destouches) 32
Chauvin, Remy 2
Chevalier, Pierre 93
Chomsky, Avram Noam 14,
22, 115
Clastres, Pierre 141
Clerambault, Edouard Gatian
de 113
Columbus, Christopher 41
Crane, Stephen 64
Cressole, Michel 16
De Broglie, Louis 67
De Heusch, Luc 141
De Troyes, Chretien 74
Deligny, Femand 127-8
Descartes, Rene 14
Dylan, Bob 7-8
Epicurus 31-2
Euclid 87, 141
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 36, 38, 45,
125-7, 140, 143
F1eutiaux, Pierre 130
Foucault, Michel II, 24-5, 84,
87, 129
Freud, Sigmund viii, 14, 77-8,
80--2, 85, 97, 103
Gide, Andre 68
Giscard d'Estaing, Valery 131
Godard, j ean-Luc 4, 9, 132
Goethe, j ohann Wolfgang
von 95
Guattari, Felix ix, II , 16-9,
155